“Help me, my boss is torturing me”: the harrowing story of a housekeeper who escapes from her locked apartment with a note she leaves

“I felt like I was going to break down,” he recalled of the moment he saw the police. “They told me ‘don’t be afraid, we’re here’. At that moment I felt strong again. I felt I could breathe again. The policemen came and I told them the truth.”

There are details in this story that some readers may find disturbing.

Nine years later, Merians continues They expect justice. Her case, far from unique, reveals how vulnerable undocumented immigrants are, and how justice is often denied even to those who survive to tell their stories.

In 2015, police charged Merians’ boss Ong Chu Bing Seren. Serious injury, attempted murder, human trafficking and violation of immigration laws. She is innocent.

Merians testified in court before finally being returned to his family. Two years later, he received word from the Indonesian embassy that prosecutors had dropped the case. Evidence is insufficient.

“The boss is freed, where is the justice,” said Hermono (a name many Indonesians use) the country’s ambassador to Malaysia when he met Meriance in October.

The embassy has retained legal counsel for her and is pushing to reopen the case against Merians’ employer.

“What’s the reason for the delay? Five years is not enough? If we don’t keep asking, (the case) will be forgotten, especially since the Merians have already returned home.”

Don’t know why Hence some malpractice cases are investigated in Malaysia, but activists point to a culture of watching domestic workers, most of whom are Indonesian. Second class citizens They do not deserve the same protection as Malaysians.

Malaysia’s foreign ministry told the BBC it would “ensure justice is served according to the law”.

In 2018, a court in Indonesia indicted two men for abducting Merians. The judge found that she had been sent to Malaysia “to work as a domestic worker for Ong Chu Bing Serene, who tortured her and caused her serious injuries”.

Merians’ ordeal was recounted in all its disturbing detail in the verdict that her employer had severely assaulted her. A broken nose On one occasion, and was used Torture her with a hot iron, pliers, hammer, sticks and pliers.

Eight years later, his body still bears the marks of these tortures. He still has a deep gash on his upper lip, four teeth are missing, and one of his ears is misshapen.

Her husband Garvius said she was unrecognizable when she was rescued: “I was shocked when they showed me the photos of Mary in the hospital.”

Last year, Malaysia and Indonesia signed an agreement to improve the conditions of Indonesian domestic workers in the country. Indonesia is now pushing to reopen the case.

Undocumented workers like her are especially vulnerable because they They keep your passport And they live with their employer in a foreign country, leaving them with few options for seeking help.

“Everyone needs to take more responsibility,” says Malaysian parliamentarian Hannah Yeoh, who wants to see an end to what she describes as a culture of silence about domestic worker abuse in the country.

Malaysia’s Ministry of Manpower says there are more 63,000 Indonesian domestic workers in the country, but it has no undocumented workers. There are no clear estimates of their numbers. The Indonesian embassy has reported 500 cases of abuse in the past five years.

Ambassador Hermono says this figure is only the “tip of the iceberg” because there are many cases, particularly involving undocumented workers, that go unreported.

“I don’t know when this will end. We know there are more victims, from torture cases to non-payment of wages and other crimes.”

“I’m going to fight for justice until I die,” says Merians. “I asked my former boss, ‘Why did you torture me?’ I want to hear that.”

She was 32 when she decided to work abroad because “the children would cry without food.” Life was difficult in her village in West Timor. No electricity or running water. And her husband, who was a daily wage earner, was barely enough to support their family of six.

Merians accepted an offer to work in Malaysia and dreamed of building a house for his family.

When he arrived in Kuala Lumpur in April 2014, the agent took his passport and handed it over to his employer. There were already recruiters in Indonesia Removed his phone.

But Merians dreamed of a better life. His job was to “take care of grandma,” his boss Serene’s mother, who was 93 at the time. She says the beatings started three weeks after she started working.

One night, Serena wanted to cook fish, but the fridge was missing because Marion put it in the freezer by mistake. Suddenly he felt the blow of the frozen fish. The head started bleeding. After that episode, she says, they beat her every day.

Merians recalled that they never let her out of the apartment. The apartment door is always closed and she doesn’t have a key. Her four neighbors who lived in the same building were unaware of her presence until the police arrived.

One of them said, “I only saw her the night she was rescued.

Merians says that torture and The beating stopped only when her boss had had enough. He then ordered Merians to clean his blood from the floor and walls.

He says that at times he thought of taking his own life. But the thought of four children kept her alive.

“I thought about fighting back,” he says. “But if he had fought, he would have died.”

Then one day in late 2014, he looked in the mirror and realized something had changed. “I couldn’t take it anymore. I was angry, not at my boss. I was angry at myself. I had to try to get out of there.”

So he wrote a message to restore his freedom.

The BBC made several attempts to contact Serena, her boss, Ong Su Ping, to get her account, but she refused to speak.

Merians says she is fighting for justice for others like her and non-survivors.

Hermono is now handling the case of a domestic worker who claims she was tortured in a completely inhumane manner. When she was rescued, she weighed just 30 kg. Your employer has been sued.

But some, like 20-year-old Adelina Chau, were not rescued in time. Her employer tortures and starves her to death.

He was charged with murder, but was acquitted in 2019. An appeal for a retrial of the case was rejected last year.

Adelina is from Merians district in West Timor. Merians says he met Adelina’s mother in her village and told her, “Even though your daughter is dead, her voice is inside me.”

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