"How does one explain the casual brutality of the agent, Ali Mahfouz? The agency system in Lebanon has always been corrupt, lacking in regulation and transparency, its violence and authoritarianism tacitly tolerated. We have known that recalcitrant workers can be returned to the agency for “corrective punishment” — a beating — if the employer is unable or unwilling to do it herself. And the financial exploitation of domestic workers by agents who take the first three months of their salaries is scandalous, fraudulent and should not be allowed.
Dismissing Alem Dechassa’s suicide as the act of a mentally ill person is too easy, a familiar piece of casuistry. She was understandably adamant and angry about her looming deportation to Ethiopia. She had probably not been paid any salary since arriving. She had probably also borrowed money to fund her journey; to her two children at home she would have returned in shame, a failed provider with nothing but a serious debt she could not repay. She did not want this. The decision to deport someone from a country should not be in the power of an agent or a sponsor.
In cases like Dechassa’s, the burden of sanity seems always to falls to the abused. At any rate, if she had allegedly attempted suicide before and her stability was genuinely a source of concern, why was she not placed under special scrutiny in Deir al-Salib psychiatric hospital?" (thanks Marc)
