End the Conspiracy of Silence : Women: The world can put teeth in the pact signed in Beijing by fighting a teen-age maid’s death sentence.

Sarah Balabagan, the 16-year-old Filipino maid sentenced to death on Sept. 15 in the United Arab Emirates for the killing of her employer who raped her, should be the poster child for the recent U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

No one issue struck as responsive a chord in this decennial gathering as the violence against women worldwide and the need to adopt dramatic steps to stop it. With the conference now history, will the afterglow of renewed concern about women result in national and international measures that will save young women like Sarah?

This unfortunate 16-year-old is typical of millions of girls and young women who comprise the majority of the poor in the world. Eschewing education so as to make it available for siblings, they enter the world of work early in life in order to bring in additional family income. Sarah sought the path many girls and women from East Asia, particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, have taken: leaving home for the promise of relatively higher-paying jobs as domestics in the oil-rich Persian Gulf states.

Bereft of familiar surroundings, these women are preyed upon from all sides: from recruiters who extract large shares of first-year earnings in exchange for a job and a passport; from employers who withhold those passports, salaries and, in Sarah’s case, food; and from many Persian Gulf governments that exempt domestics from their country’s labor laws. Worst yet, sexual harassment, beatings from members of host families, rapes and other forms of physical assault compound the misery of the expatriate female worker. The trafficking of women workers has evolved into a modern form of slavery, and it is evident that there is far more value placed on women’s work than on women’s lives.

Sarah was no exception. She was supplied with a falsified passport by a recruiter that raised her age from 15 to 27 so that she could accept overseas employment. Once ensconced in her employer’s home, she was subjected to escalating sexual advances that culminated in rape by her 57-year-old employer at knifepoint. In the struggle, she stabbed him repeatedly. Found guilty of manslaughter by a lower court, she was initially sentenced to a seven-year prison term and fined $40,500. A retrial requested by the president of the United Arab Emirates resulted in the most recent death sentence ruling by a higher court.

This tragic incident of sexual assault committed by an employer is an all-too-familiar pattern for foreign domestics working in the Gulf states. The difference in Sarah’s case is that she struck back--an extreme response to extreme conditions, but it did bring her story to the public. Unfortunately, many such cases go unreported because of a conspiracy of silence--silence from the victims who fear the consequences of speaking out in a foreign land, and, until recently, the silence of Asian governments that fear the loss of income workers such as Sarah send home should they object too strenuously.

If there was any point at all to the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women, that conspiracy of silence must be broken. It shouldn’t be left to Filipinos alone to demand clemency for this teen-ager. All those governments who signed the U.N. document in Beijing, which guarantees women’s rights, and all those leaders of non-governmental organizations who pressured them to do so should join the hue and cry against this miscarriage of justice.

As First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton stated with such conviction in Beijing: “Human rights are women’s rights; and women’s rights are human rights.” For Sarah Balabagan, that principle has a special urgency, but it is up to all of us to transform the same principle into action.