05/10/2013
NEW DELHI: A teenage Indian maid rescued last week with
horrific injuries has alleged her employer forced her to drink urine,
kept her naked in the bathroom and burnt her with a frying pan, reports
said Saturday.
The young woman was speaking to the media Friday after being rescued
by police from a home in an upscale New Delhi neighbourhood following
complaints by neighbours.
Police say the teenager had been tortured by her employer, a 50-year-old Indian woman working for a French multinational.
“(My employer) forced me to drink urine, kept me naked in the
bathroom and would singe me with a frying pan and hit me with a broom,”
the maid told The Hindustan Times newspaper.
“She would laugh after beating me,” the girl alleged.
The girl also alleged her nails were pulled out and a piece of paper
on which she had written down the telephone numbers of her relatives had
been torn up, The Indian Express reported.
After her rescue last week, social rights campaigners said she had been slashed with knives and mauled by dogs.
The girl's account has focused the spotlight on abuse of domestic servants, including children.
The employees are sometimes trafficked from remote and
poverty-stricken Indian states to urban centres and toil for long hours
in homes for little and or no pay.
The teenager, who was initially reported to be 15 but is around 18
according to police, spoke to journalists in hospital where she is
recovering from multiple injuries all over her body, including a deep
gash on her head.
The maid recounted her alleged ordeal in detail after being reunited with her mother Friday, the English-language daily said.
Photographs showed the girl hugging her tearful mother inside a hospital room.
The girl, from the impoverished eastern state of Jharkhand, told
police after her rescue that she had been working for her employers for
the past year.
Social rights activists who assisted in the police rescue said she
was slashed with knives and mauled by five dogs kept as pets by her
employer who lived with her 85-year-old mother in the house.
The employer, who has been arrested and is facing charges of illegal
confinement and assault, has denied the allegations and has accused the
teenager of being mentally unstable.
Charges would not be pressed against the employer's elderly mother on account of her age, police said.
Reports of impoverished domestic servants being abused by their rich employers frequently appear in Indian newspapers.
In April last year, police arrested a wealthy doctor couple who
locked up their 13-year-old maid while they went away on holiday.
She was rescued by firefighters when neighbours spotted her crying on an outside balcony.
In 2006, India passed legislation banning employment of children
under 14 in households, roadside eateries and hotels, but the law is
widely flouted in the country of 1.2 billion people.
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