Activists seek greater rights for Hong Kong’s domestic workers. File photo
- THIS WEEK IN ASIA /SOCIETY
SLAVE HUSBANDS OF HONG KONG: THE MEN WHO MARRY INTO SERVITUDE
Vulnerable men from India and Pakistan are being tricked into arranged marriages and trafficked to Hong Kong where they work as bonded labourers and indentured servants for their in-laws, too afraid or ashamed to speak out
BY SYLVIA YU
22 MAY 2017
Photo: AFP
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Shahid Sandhu’s sense of loss and anxiety from his loveless marriage knows no bounds. But his is more than a bad connection.
From the time he left Pakistan to join his new wife overseas four years ago, she, her brothers and her parents have been controlling his every move.
They force him to work round the clock, seven days a week – as a bonded labourer at a construction site during the day and as an indentured servant at home on evenings and his day off. They beat him and verbally abuse him at any sign of exhaustion or dissent. They take all his money, refuse him food and have even threatened to kill him.
Sandhu knows what they are doing is wrong and illegal, but the endless abuse has broken him down. He battles severe depression and nightmares, too exhausted, afraid and ashamed to speak out.
Sandhu’s situation sounds as if it’s from a bygone era, but it is happening today, in one of the world’s most advanced cities: Hong Kong. And his plight is not unique.
Lawyers and NGO outreach workers in the city’s South Asian community say Sandhu is just one of dozens of known cases in which men have been tricked into arranged marriages before being trafficked to Hong Kong and forced into indentured labour by their bride’s family.
Typically, the men are preyed upon by future in-laws who select them for their vulnerability and promise them first-world lives that will enable them to support loved ones back home.
Once in Hong Kong, a combination of isolation, fear of retribution towards their families and a profound, culturally ingrained sense of shame prevents them from speaking out.
For every man who does come forward, untold numbers hold back, preferring to live out their miserable, hellish lives in the shadows rather than risk disgrace.
Campaigners have a term for these men: slave grooms.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
The nightmare Sandhu found himself living is a far cry from the charmed lifestyle the 34-year-old had imagined when he was approached by a matchmaker about marrying a Hong Kong-born Pakistani woman. Hearing about her wealthy family helped seal the deal for Sandhu and his impoverished parents, who are farmers in the Punjab region of Pakistan. Sandhu, who has a university degree in commerce, had a respectable job at a bank in Pakistan, but his salary was meagre and the prospect of a prosperous life in Hong Kong meant financial security for his parents. He married his bride in Pakistan, arriving in Hong Kong months later on a dependant visa.
Some slave grooms exhibit signs of serious depression and even Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Photo: SCMP Pictures
The post-wedding bliss vanished immediately. Sandhu’s in-laws and wife locked away his passport and identity papers for “safe keeping” – something that is against the law – then informed him that he would be working overtime at a construction site six days a week to earn money for his bride and her entire family. Every night, and on his one day off each week, he would do the domestic work. Whenever Sandhu complained, verbal and physical abuse kept him in his place.
“My in-laws were always bullying me. Although I am a university graduate, I was always called illiterate and a jungle man. Once I shouted back at them and they beat me. After that I was resigned to my fate and work,” he said.
Broken though he was, Sandhu did manage to reach out to Richard Aziz Butt, a sought-after immigration consultant in the South Asian community, having got his number from a work colleague. “I need to get out,” Sandhu told Butt. However, Sandhu was not willing to go to the police. Like many other slave grooms, he feared deportation, repercussions from his in-laws and shame.
“I would call him a slave groom,” said Butt. “His marriage was arranged so that he could be brought here to work as a machine to earn money for the bride’s family. All these things are elements of slavery,” Butt said. “The [victims] are monitored 24 hours [by their tormentors]. These people will not talk [to the police] even if they are abused.
Once in Hong Kong the slave grooms are forced to work round the clock at construction sites and carry out domestic work on their day off. Photo: AFP
“These men are from male-dominated [patriarchal] countries. If they say to someone that they were treated like slaves, people will laugh at them and call them cowards, useless and lazy. Therefore, they dare not say anything to anyone.”
Butt has met more than 100 South Asian men trafficked to Hong Kong through marriages since 1997. Their visas are usually processed directly by the family without a consultant or lawyer, to keep a low profile. “I believe 20 per cent of the husbands are slave grooms,” said Butt. “They are brought to Hong Kong to work for the wife and the family.”
Most of the men are from the Punjab region of Pakistan and India but some come from other South Asian countries like Bangladesh and Nepal.
NOT ALONE
Babu Bishu, a former pimp turned frontline NGO worker in Chungking Mansions – a building complex in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong, known for cheap eateries, dodgy deals and as a gathering place for South Asians – has helped three men from the Punjab region of India who were trafficked into marriages and forced to work in restaurants and a tailor shop. Over the years, he’s met more than 200 vulnerable South Asians in Hong Kong who were deceived into forced labour. He says both men and women “from poor families migrate to Hong Kong through arranged marriages” and then find themselves enslaved – in some of the women’s cases as house prostitutes to be abused both by the groom and father-in-law. “It’s miserable. It’s heartbreaking,” said Bishu.
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The UN’s Palermo Protocol defines trafficking in persons as using means such as deception and force to have total control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation including slavery.
Nurul Qoiriah, head of the Hong Kong office of the UN’s International Organisation for Migration, said: “Traffickers may use various means [of coercion and control] to prevent victims from reporting or seeking help from others, including the use of... threatening reprisal against victims’ loved ones, debt bondage and isolation.”
A week ago, Sandhu was famished at the end of an 18-hour construction shift and decided to get some food. That angered his younger brother-in-law, who gives him just enough money for transport. He beat Sandhu for disobeying him.
Sandhu’s salary from construction goes into his bank account, but that is controlled by his brother-in-law and wife, who take all his money. “They only put some travel money on my Octopus card and every day she checks on her phone how much money I have on my card. And where I spent it,” he said.
His wife and in-laws threatened to kill him if he tried to escape. “Now I am trapped,” he said.
Tony Dickinson, a psychologist in Hong Kong, said it was important to note the men’s predicament was not a sign of weakness. “If these guys are so weak, how come they work in construction?” Dickinson asked. “It’s fear and threats that hold them in place.”
“Public perception would be that this is nasty and terrible and that it’s hard to believe this happening in our society and that we allowed this to happen. But there’s no legal protection for these guys. If his passport is being withheld, it’s illegal.”
KARAMJIT
The details of Sandhu’s story are depressingly familiar to other slave grooms Butt is working with. Karamjit Singh, 28, was introduced to the family of a Hong Kong-born Indian Punjabi woman. Her family regaled him and his widower father with stories of a prosperous life in Hong Kong. They had come all the way to Moga, India, to look for a suitable groom. The prospect of a “sense of security in an advanced country” made him agree.
Singh, an only child, and his elderly father were struggling financially and he was unable to finish high school. Little did he know his soon-to-be parents-in-law had targeted him for this very reason.
“The brothers-in-law want to control Karmanjit,” said Butt. “These people go to find the groom who does not have a big family to support, usually the only son and from a poor family. Then they isolate him.”
Singh had a “very good wedding” at a Sikh temple in India in 2012. A year later, after the immigration department processed and issued his dependant visa, he arrived in Hong Kong.
His brother-in-law and father-in-law told him that he’d be working in two jobs in construction during the day and as a security guard in the evenings. “They beat him with women’s high heels. It is degrading and aimed to destroy his self-esteem,” Butt said.
When it came to his salary, his father-in-law controlled everything and kept and used his ATM card; Singh would get spending money from his wife.
Money is just one way families have of controlling their slave grooms. File photo
He regrets his decision to marry his wife, whom he describes as a mild-mannered woman. Singh says she is powerless and cannot stop her brothers and father. “I can’t escape. I want to get rid of my in-laws,” he said.
Singh reached out to Butt several months ago in hope of finding a way out of his marriage. He said he would never go to the police.
HIDDEN PROBLEM
Slavery and human trafficking within the context of family and marriage is underreported worldwide, and Hong Kong’s Immigration Department has no official record on exploitation and trafficking of spouses who migrate to the city.
However, figures for forced marriages – a related offence, as the victim loses control of their life – are kept in countries such as Britain and Australia, where forced marriages are a crime. Last year, the British Home Office Forced Marriage Unit found about 20 per cent of its 1,145 cases involved male victims. Its cases have involved men from more than 90 countries since 2005, but more than 40 per cent of the cases come from Pakistan, followed by Bangladesh on 8 per cent and India on 6 per cent.
Sandy Wong, chairwoman of the Anti-Human Trafficking Committee of the Hong Kong Federation of Women Lawyers, said Hong Kong does not have a specific law on forced marriages or slave marriages but prohibition is scattered in different laws like the Marriage Ordinance (which relates to the age of consent) and the Crimes Ordinance (which prohibits sexual acts with underage people).
“We need to have an updated and tightened framework to deal with all forms of human trafficking. I would like to have everything in one law but that would take even longer to get it researched, lobbied and passed,” Wong said. “The party procuring the forced marriage” could also be in breach of making a false representation to an immigration officer – a crime that can lead to 14 years’ prison or a fine of HK$150,000. Aiders and abetters are liable to the same penalties.
“I believe [trafficking through migration for marriage] is not only happening to men, it’s also happening to women. It’s difficult for them to speak up because of cultural values as they feel it’s taboo,” said Qoiriah at the International Organisation for Migration. “There’s more social pressure when they return home as they’re perceived to be making trouble if they leave these exploitative marriages. It’s psychologically difficult to speak up to face the situation.”
A poor Pakistani man sleeps on a pavement. The prospect of a better life in Hong Kong is used to lure slave grooms to the city. Photo: EPA
She said the IOM Indonesia office had helped several Indonesian, ethnic Chinese “slave brides” who migrated to Hong Kong recover from sexual exploitation and forced prostitution.
Dickinson, the psychologist, said slave grooms and brides were “likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder symptomology like depression and severe anxiety of retribution”. “His in-laws most likely can threaten his family,” said Dickinson. “It’s a life-or-death issue, they may be killed. In some countries, brothers kill their sister if they leave a marriage.”
‘I was forced to sell my body in a Hong Kong bar’
Nita, an NGO leader, said some families in Hong Kong that trafficked men and women from vulnerable backgrounds in South Asia were learning from each other. “They have no conscience and are acting out of pure greed,” she said.
Sandhu said his in-laws repeatedly reminded him that it was his marriage that enabled him to come to Hong Kong. “To come to Hong Kong, Pakistani people spend millions of rupees to get a visa. They told me I got it for free,” he said, referring to the fraudulent visas offered by agents who charge extortionate fees to people desperate to come to the city.
... Too long! Read more on the link (SYLVIA YU on South China Morning Post: International Edition)