This is how the NWDM effectively helps:

Intervening in cases of (sexual) abuse and crisis situations

Providing legal aid in cases of non-payment and taking abuses to court

Offering crisis shelter to runaway girls

Bringing girls together and reinforce their organisation

Organising lobby work for recognition and protection by the authorities

In the worst cases helping girls to run away

Informing parents and children in the poor countryside, by means of video and role-playing techniques, on the abuses, with a view to prevention

NATIONAL DOMESTIC WORKERS MOVEMENT

Some 400 local collaborators reach over 4 million women and children!!!

Among the estimated 20 million minors in India doing work for a living, 50% does so in the ambience of a private home. They are literally servants of all work. Undernourished, underpaid and lonely, they frequently cannot even go to school and are doomed to become easy victims of a boss who cannot keep his hand off them. Often they descend from a lower social class or from a faraway region in which hunger is prevailing.
As domestic labour is not recognised as work, industrial law in India is not applicable to girl servants. Many times they are subject to the capriciousness of their employer and find themselves in a situation of modern slavery.

Agreeing that children are not supposed to do such work without offering them an alternative, we would just let them suffocate in their misery! That’s why the National Domestic Workers Movement has chosen a pragmatic approach: let’s help where we can, make them mature, organise them.
In the best case this amounts to the creation of neighbourhoods where elder girls contact, welcome and guide newcomers. This way many of them are capable of combining their work with a certain kind of education. In the most serious of cases, Jeanne’s endeavour succeeds in helping girls to run away and taking abuses to court.

Instead of creating new forms of dependence, as so often happens with development work, the movement stimulates the girls and young women themselves to developing a feeling of responsibility and initiative. Those who exert the leadership within the movement make contacts with other partners in misfortune and support the movement from its base up. On the political level, the organisation urges the necessity of a legal and economic footing for the girl servants.
One of the pleas of feminism, not only in India, is the recognition of domestic work as fully-fledged labour, which is both essential to life quality and making an integral contribution to the economic process. The situation of oppression and oblivion of thousands of housemaids in India is a symptom not only of distorted international economic relations, but also of the underestimation of the work that traditionally accrued to women.

The NDWM endeavours – not without success - to make the economic and personal rights of girl servants be recognised. Whereas in the past they were due to be available to their employers day and night and seven days a week, nowadays they have both a maximum number of working hours and a minimum wage. Elementary labour rights, including medical insurance and pension are still goals to the movement.
To this purpose, national and international networks are established with organisations such as the commission for human rights of the United Nations, international labour organisations and movements protesting against slavery. Among all those organisations, listening to the stories of the girls themselves remains the primordial task.

Whenever a child is being abused, not just the mere abuse is at stake, but the whole system giving way to abuse. In order to prevent repetition of such events, we try to change structures and make things move. Being put in charge of the Domestic Movement gives the house servants a sense of freedom and regained dignity.

Severely abused children who have been taken back to their families are now the best advocates against child abuse, some want to become doctors, others want to become lawyers. In the long run, they will be the ones leading the fight.

Different teams in other big Indian cities have already joined the movement of Jeanne Devos and her Indian co-workers. People from all backgrounds. On top of this the movement can also count on the cooperation of Indian lawyers, doctors, human rights activists and female police officers.
An ever increasing flow of Indians want change.
“They only needed someone to show them that it was possible.”

UNHEARD, UNSEEN, UNREACHED, stories of pain and struggle; Able and Creative though kept in slavery
by NATIONAL DOMESTIC WORKERS MOVEMENT - child domestic workers