The picture in front of you is that of a living room, it's in the evening, the parents are out, and there is a small child around the age of two years lying on the sofa crying. Into the picture comes a small framed woman, clasped in her hand is a shoe, she lifts the child and proceeds to beat him repeatedly on his back, as the child screams the woman persists in the beating. The picture ends there.
This isn't a fictional story; this was a hidden camera in the home of a family in the UAE. The parents of this household began to suspect that their maid was physically abusing their child, so they installed a hidden camera, and discovered that there was abuse taking place.
Good and decent
I want you to think about this image, because if you are reading this today, you are probably one of the many households in our society that has a maid, or even several maids, and many of you depend on your maids to look after your children. My goal is not to make you paranoid or to demonise a group of people in a particular profession, because in every profession you will find bad people, but you will also find good and decent people.
I chose to write about this issue because I have witnessed the emergence of a disturbing cultural phenomenon, one that has been on the rise since the 1970s, with the discovery of oil, and the abundance of cheap labour. This combination has resulted in the excessive dependence on maids, an excessive dependence which has negative implications for our society.
I am not suggesting that nobody acquires the services of maids, but I am advising that there should be a greater sense of responsibility towards this issue; don't exploit the fact that it's cheap to have a maid, and in so doing you end up bringing an excessive number, keep in mind that there are too many cases of maids who have deserted the homes of their sponsors, and are illegally residing in our country, and they are one of the sources of crime and instability in our society.
Furthermore, if you do have a maid, remember that this is a stranger you have brought into your home, on a temporary basis, to assist you with housekeeping and general chores, not someone who you should be depending on to raise your child while you are busy. The duration of time a child spends with a maid, is time that impacts and shapes this child's habits, values, language and identity.
The profile of the majority of maids in our society, are that of primarily illiterate persons, many of them have worked in abusive homes, so you don't really know what their psychological or emotional states are, so we should not expect them or ask them to provide more beyond housekeeping and general chores.
Studies and trends show that we as a society are increasingly depending on maids for the supervision and care of our children, and consequences which have resulted range from the emotional attachment of children to their maids as opposed to their mothers, and a distortion in many children's linguistic abilities due to most maids' inability to speak proper English or Arabic. Then there are issues of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. There are also issues of foreign values learnt by the child by spending too much time with the maid. These are just a few of the many emerging negative social phenomenon which pose a challenge to our society today.
As far as I am concerned, we have to raise the red flag when we see families, leaving "child-rearing" to strangers, because that's exactly what you're doing when you bring a maid into your home, with absolutely no background as to that person's history, or emotional state, and yet you leave your kids to be supervised and cared for by a stranger, while you are out at work or out with friends. Most of us don't do this intentionally, but fall into a lifestyle of laxness and dependency.
Sacred duty
Remember, if you bring children into this world you have a responsibility to raise them.
In Islam we use the word ammana; this is something sacred that is left in your care. Your children are an ammana from God to you, it is your sacred duty to guard them, to guide them, to give them the freedom to grow, and to instill in them a moral fabric which enables them to distinguish between right and wrong, and empowers them to become moral, determined human beings with noble purposes in life.
Najla Al Awadhi is a member of the Federal National Council, Deputy CEO Dubai Media Incorporated and General Manager of Dubai One TV.
