Aged eighteen, just three months after giving birth to her second child, Dalisay emigrated to Spain. Leaving her daughters in the care of her sister in the Philippines, she started a job as a live-in domestic worker in Madrid, sending money home each month. Not long after moving into her employer’s family address, the husband began an unusual routine. “He would wait until his wife was away on a business trip and then walk around the house naked,” she recalls, scrunching a tissue in her hand. Dalisay felt uncomfortable about her employer’s behavior but hadn’t yet recognized it as gender-based violence. “I was scared and I knew I had to get out of that situation,” she says, dabbing her tears. “If I hadn’t, I think something much worse could have happened.”
Teresa, sixty-four, a qualified English teacher from the Philippines, has been employed as a domestic worker in Madrid for three decades. In one job, she was repeatedly exposed to her employer’s genitals, in his home. “The first time it happened, I was very frightened,” she recalls. “I dropped my basket of laundry and ran away, I left the house. I didn’t know what to do. It was a very scary time.” But when asked if she considers this as gender-based violence, she shakes her head — initially not believing it was.
Teresa and Dalisay didn’t consent to seeing this. Yet both wrestled with these ex-employers’ right to be naked in their own homes, where public-private boundaries are blurred. What they experienced could be defined less as nudity than exhibitionism: a compulsion to behave sexually or expose one’s genitals in public. If this happened in their own homes, this was also someone else’s workplace.
Over the past nine months, including through fifty in-person interviews, 106 female migrant domestic workers across Spain have shared experiences of gender-based violence in the workplace. Half of the women surveyed reported such acts, ranging from verbal abuse to rape —…
Auteur: Leah Pattem
