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From Victims of Trafficking to Freedom Fighters: Rethinking Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East

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Revisiting Slavery and Antislavery

Abstract

Throughout the Middle East migrant women are employed to work in people’s homes. While some experience good working relations with employers, others experience forms of abuse and labour coercion. This chapter evaluates critically the different ways that system of unfree labour has been variously described and analysed as a form of ‘contract slavery’, ‘debt bondage’ and ‘trafficking’. It also shows how migrant women who describe themselves as ‘freelancers’ exit their original employer’s home both to escape that relation and in hopes of securing a better situation outside of the regular system of employment. Women who work as freelance migrant domestic workers challenge directly that state-enforced control over their mobility and are on the vanguard of those migrants who are seeking through their own actions to effect social change.

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  1. Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

    Mark Johnson

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  1. Mark Johnson
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  1. School of History, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Laura Brace

  2. School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Julia O'Connell Davidson

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Johnson, M. (2018). From Victims of Trafficking to Freedom Fighters: Rethinking Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East. In: Brace, L., O'Connell Davidson, J. (eds) Revisiting Slavery and Antislavery. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90623-2_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90623-2_7

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