Washing, ironing and ... ?

The Afrikaners have a saying, "Oumense, vroumense, kaffirs en kinders" (old people, women, blacks and children) to describe categories of people who give the most problems, but it seems that some white men can't be left alone with black maids.

Yet another aspect of South Africa's sick society. Then again, domestic workers are mostly far too dependent on a single employer because of cooking duties which then requires use of a sleep-in room. As soon as a maid is dependent on a single employer and sleeps in, she is forced to hang around the property too long and too often, and that's where the potential for abuse arises. It's not the maid's fault, it's the arse-wiped employer's fault.

I would think the "madams" had a very good idea what the grandpa and husbands were getting up to in the cases mentioned below, but didn't want to face up to it because it's just another hassle at the end of a long working day.

Suggestion: fire the no good husband, and you won't need the sleep-in maid. Problem solved.

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Behind suburbia’s closed doors, domestic workers run a gauntlet of sexual harassment. A naked grandfather demanding sexual favours, a middle-class cross-dressing husband addicted to watching pornography while fondling his domestic worker and a house-husband who pesters his live-in helper for oral sex ...

This is the gauntlet domestic workers in South Africa run as they try to earn a living. Sexual harassment of South Africa’s 1.2 million domestic workers is rife, according to a Johannesburg NGO, the Sexual Harassment Education Project.

While no recent statistics are available, domestic worker unions and employer agencies admit sexual harassment is an ugly fact of life in many homes around the country — and has been on the increase in recent months.

Data from 2003 indicates that domestic workers may account for as many as 86% of sexual harassment victims in the country, according to the project. A spokesman for the project said this week that the number of sexual harassment cases reported by domestic workers had increased since March — as a result of workshops to acquaint them of their rights.

The organisation receives an average of two sexual harassment complaints a day, more and more of which are coming from domestic workers, it said.

“When we ask them why they don’t report it to the madam, they say the madams will never believe them,” said the organisation’s acting director, Nonhlanhla Tshabalala.

Tshabalala said domestic workers often did not report sexual harassment to the police either — even when it involved rape — as they knew it would be their word against that of their employer. Instead, they either reported it to the project or to their unions and employment agencies, who tried to intervene on their behalf — or they left the job.

Tshabalala said that because sexual harassment was hard to prove, they would mediate between employer and employee — and instruct employers to pay for counselling. Tshabalala said the government ought to re-introduce the police’s sexual offences unit, and amend the Sexual Offences Act to include this crime.

Eunice Dhladhla, assistant general secretary of the South African Domestic Services and Allied Workers’ Union, told of one case where a Parktown, Johannesburg, man would drop his wife off at work in the morning before returning home to dress up in his wife’s underwear and stockings. He would then load a pornographic DVD and call the domestic worker to watch it with him while he fondled her.

In another matter, a domestic worker was severely beaten for refusing to sleep with her boss. “Every night, the male employer would ask her to sleep with him and she said, ‘No, I’m pregnant’,” said Dhladhla. “He hit her with a hose pipe.” Dhladhla said the employee did not press charges against her employer, preferring to leave work and head back home to the Eastern Cape.

Kate Shuttleworth, founder of domestic worker agency Marvellous Maids, which has 16 franchises around the country with between 250 and 700 domestic workers on their books, said she knew of four cases of sexual harassment so far this year , and three last year — one involving one of her own franchisees.

Just last month, a grandfather staying at his children’s house on an “exclusive estate” in George while they were overseas, walked around stark naked, asking for oral sex. The agency immediately fetched the worker, and would no longer supply services to that family, Shuttleworth said.

She said in another case this year, a domestic worker — placed with a young couple where the wife was a company executive while her husband stayed at home — was constantly pestered for oral sex.

“It’s absolutely shocking how some men behave,” said Shuttleworth. “This is one of the most vulnerable sectors of society where they earn the least, and are dead scared of losing their jobs.” In one ongoing matter dealt with by the sexual harassment project, a 41-year-old domestic worker is still trying to get R80,000 of the R100,000 awarded to her in an out-of-court settlement with her former employer, who sexually harassed and raped her at least three times a week for three months.

She had worked for the divorced father of two, a European man living in South Africa, for three months when she was attacked. The woman — who asked not to be identified — told the Sunday Times that the abuse started one morning when she took coffee to his room. “He used to ask me to take off my clothes. He used to play with my private parts. I was scared, but I pretended I was fine,” she said, crying as she recalled the 2004 incident. “He said that if I told anyone, he would blacklist me. He would make sure I didn’t get work,” the woman said.