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28 March 2024

Forcing maid to stay may turn her into 'time bomb'

Published
By Staff

Families in the UAE should not mistreat their housemaids as this could turn them into time bombs inside their homes and push them to hurt their children, a senior Dubai police officer was quoted on Tuesday as saying.

Maids who ask their employers to allow them to travel home should not be stopped and should be either permitted to take leave or sent back to the local labour office for repatriation, said Major General Khalil Ibrahim Al Mansouri, assistant police commander for criminal affairs.

He said an Ethiopian maid who stabbed three children in Dubai this week cited mistreatment by their mother and her failure to pay her wages for three months.

“Mistreatment is the root cause of these crimes. I should not stick to a person who does not want to work for me because their presence at my home could become a time bomb. Families must take measures to guarantee the rights of their domestic workers because at the end of the day, they are humans.”

Mansouri said mothers must look after their children and not leave this for the maids, adding that most families in the UAE treat their maids properly except for some individual cases. “Good treatment of housemaids will protect children from a possible retaliation by maids.

"Mistreating maids or forcing them to do unbearable work will only lead to unforeseeable consequences against the employers’ children.”

Al Mansouri spoke on the ‘Al Rabia’ah’ radio programme about the case of the Ethiopian housemaid who stabbed three children of an Emirati family as an act of revenge.

He was quoted as saying: “It was fortunate that the children are of an age where they could resist and escape to the washing room.”

The police found the maid in a hysterical state where she was crying after she discovered that she committed such crime.

He cited an instance where a maid of an Asian nationality killed the child of her employer recently for not allowing her to travel to see her family.
The care of their child was the issue. So the maid got rid of the child.