In Beijing, Sisters Can Help Sisters : Abuse: Delegates to the U.N. women’s conference have a duty to speak up for domestic workers kept in bondage.

It is going to be interesting, to say the least, to see how the international women’s conference in Beijing. is going to deal with the problem of women who beat up on other women.

That the scandal surfaced in Singapore as a consequence of the execution of a Filipino domestic is almost a distraction from the epicenter of the worst performers: the oil-rich Persian Gulf states.

In Singapore, more serious attention is given to the rules and procedures of law than in most of the countries of the Gulf (albeit, as everywhere, when capital punishment is practiced, there’s no recourse when there is a miscarriage of justice). The exploitation of women by women, or indeed any other kind of exploitation, is much easier in countries whose legal institutions lack autonomy and where the lady--or come to that, the man--is sovereign in her own home.

The Philippine government, one of whose most important exports is migrant workers, hit the roof after the execution, charging that the maid was too slightly built to have made such a savage blow.

Hard on the heels of that story, a 15-year-old Filipino maid in the United Arab Emirates was sentenced to seven years in jail for killing her employer after he raped her, even though the same court awarded her $27,000 in damages as compensation for the rape. After another outcry in the Philippines, the government of the Emirates has ordered a retrial.

It is this combination of events that has at last put the issue of female migration in Asia on the political map, but whether it stays so will depend a lot on the U.N. conference in Beijing. The whole issue of young, vulnerable females pushed out of their homeland to work in a strange place in harsh conditions for low pay needs to be held up against a hard light. The fuss is already starting to die down in the Philippines. The government has no big interest in keeping public outrage aflamed. The Philippine economy can’t afford to do without the immense flow of hard currency generated by migrants’ remittances. In the Philippines’ dash to growth, it is an essential lubricant.

Most of these young women work 12 to 15 hours a day and are often on permanent call. One study of Sri Lankan women domestics in the Middle East found that more than one-third worked in excess of 15 hours a day; only 13% were allowed one day off a week, while 71% had no paid holidays and were obliged to work continuously throughout their contract period.

“Many of the workers feel trapped,” says a report, “The Work of Strangers,” published by the International Labor Office. “The employers usually take their passports and may not even allow them out of the house. But the women cannot quit, because they would need to pay the $1,500 or more that their employers have spent on bringing them to the country. In recent years, many of them, particularly in Kuwait, have fled their employers to take refuge in their country’s embassy, alleging that they’ve not been paid or that their employers have beaten or raped them.”

“It’s usually the woman of the house who sets the tone,” adds Roger Bohning of the ILO. “Of course, when it’s a rape it’s the man, but most of the abuses, including the beatings, are woman-made.”

Bohning is a sensitive and caring bureaucrat, who does rather more than just compile facts and figures and publish reports. He’s tried talking to Saudi and Kuwaiti officials, and finds that even when sympathetic, they give the impression that their countrymen “are so ingrained in their habits that they don’t realize that these girls, hundreds of thousands of them, are almost slaves.”

On an issue such as this, an organization like the International Labor Office, meant to deal with labor relations, seems to have its hands tied. “Even if we were to push for a convention outlawing abuse, these countries probably wouldn’t ratify it.”

Perhaps sisters talking to sisters, as is supposed to happen in Beijing, might get somewhere where others fail. There will be women in the Saudi, Kuwaiti and Emirates’ delegations. Can they be addressed, woman to woman, without the usual buffer of political and bureaucratic men?

For a brief moment, women who want to change the rigidities and customs of their societies have been given a bit of leverage. The fulcrum is female.