Endangered Wanniyala-Aetto Women as Sex Slaves in the Middle East. (Reports and Notices)
2001; Berghahn Books; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1752-2366
Autores Tópico(s)Sex work and related issues
ResumoRich gentlemen from oil countries and the Middle East are educating themselves on endangered peoples--women, in particular. Hearsay draws their attention to young Wanniyala-Aetto maidens from the rainforests of Sri Lanka. Wishing for some exotic spice in their sex life these gentlemen desire something rare, someone no one has consumed before in their country, a curious endangered specimen of our species. The Wanniyala-Aetto, a tiny foraging community, now numbers even less than the endangered elephants of Sri Lanka. The first sixteen Wanniyala-Aetto women were delivered to their masters' houses in early February. The local recruiter is a Sinhalese, the daughter of an alcoholic shopkeeper from the area. She receives 7,000 Sri Lankan Rupees per woman, a considerable sum in Sri Lanka, when one remembers that a government schoolteacher's salary is only Rs. 6,000. The shopkeeper's daughter believes in the job descriptions presented by the Arabs' agents in the capital city. Urbanised Sinhalese women from the west coast visit the Wanniyala-Aetto village to reconfirm the stories. The future of the girls in a disintegrating society seems unpromising, compared to life in Kuwait, Bahrain, Riyadh, Dubai or Jordan. Signing the five-year contract as a housemaid would allow them to wear silk saris with gold embroideries, many gold bangles and jewelled necklaces every day. A tempting alternative for a girl inside a government `rehabilitation village'. Once the local recruiter has a group of about twenty women, a minibus arrives to take them from their forest homes to the capital. The first transport arrived without prior notice to the village at eleven o'clock at night, and the girls had to depart instantaneously. Seven hours later they disembark at the city centre in Colombo. There they have to wait for another vehicle that takes them the last kilometre to a private house or a hotel suite where the agents evaluate the human merchandise. This takes between three to five days, and no one has yet had the chance to tell what happens inside. Travel documents, visas and passports are delivered at the airport, and the destinations are not even defined for the girls themselves until the time of boarding the plane. The latest shipment was to Jordan on February 15; they checked in at five o'clock in the morning. Although the transactions appear arbitrary and sudden, they are well prepared. As soon as they are listed, the girls, on their own initiative, have to find a hospital in Colombo for a physical check-up and for consultation with `Family Planning'. `Family Planning' in India and in Sri Lanka is usually an euphemism for sterilisation. However, today there are alternatives, such as hormone injections that remain effective for five years or the artificial ampoule implanted subcutaneously into their upper arm. The ampoules exude hormones daily during five years, to prevent pregnancy. The reason given for this `voluntary' action is to prevent pregnancy when the girls return home on vacations. According to The Foreign Employment Bureau in Sri Lanka some Sri Lankan women in the Middle East are `subjected to harassment because they were not familiar with the work expected of them and lacked training' (Perera 2001). Even if these rainforest women become housemaids there are severe obstacles for their training, since the Wanniyala-Aetto lifestyle is so very different. These women are brought up to cook on an open fire and collect food from the forest or through swidden cultivation, so this transition, even if `voluntary', must be very painful for them. Once the girls arrive in the Middle East, they cannot tell anyone at home where they are, much less flee. Many cannot write even in the Sinhalese script, let alone in Arabic or in Roman letters. The Wanniyala-Aetto speak an almost extinct language that few outsiders understand even in their own country and surely no one in the Middle East. The first question is, are these girls being sent to work as housemaids? …
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