The hidden trafficking of domestic workers

On 19 June in Dhanmondi, Dhaka, an 11-year-old domestic worker died after falling from a high-rise building, with suspicions of abuse or forced escape under investigation. Just days earlier in Khulna''s Sonadanga, two police officers were arrested for brutally abusing a teenage house help, who was beaten and burned until neighbors intervened and rescued her.

Similar incidents include the 8 March death of 15-year-old Pinky in Banani, where witnesses alleged she was tortured and thrown from a rooftop, and a case in Barishal where 14-year-old reported years of abuse, including being scalded burned with hot water. In another disturbing case, an 11-year-old domestic worker in Uttara was found with severe injuries after allegedly being beaten and burned in a household linked to a senior airline official. More recently in Banani, a young woman was rescued only after throwing a "Save me" note from a window, triggering public outrage and police action.

Together, these cases reflect a deeply entrenched pattern of violence within domestic work settings, often hidden behind closed doors and only exposed when extreme harm or death occurs. UNICEF has warned of a sharp rise in brutal violence against children, including rape and fatalities in homes and communities, and called for stronger safeguarding systems and use of the national child helpline (1098).

Reinforcing this, Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK) reported at least 118 children subjected to sexual assault or severe abuse in just the first five months of 2026, with several deaths and delayed justice responses worsening outcomes. Police data further shows thousands of cases filed under child protection laws within a short period, though experts stress that underreporting remains significant due to stigma and fear.

Despite strong legal frameworks, enforcement gaps, weak investigation systems, and limited victim support services continue to undermine protection. The National Child Labour Survey 2022 found roughly 2.09 million children working in domestic service nationwide — 2.01 million of them entirely unpaid — making this one of the largest single concentrations of unprotected child labour in the country, and one of the least visible.

A father speaks to his child: You will get to eat three meals a day. You will have clean clothes. You will live in a building. You will help your family survive. For families living with chronic hunger, such promises are not persuasion. They are survival. For an eight-year-old girl shaped by malnutrition, hunger is routine, not a crisis. When she is told she will be treated "like family," the offer sounds like rescue.

What follows is rarely recorded as trafficking. There is no border crossing. No forged passport. No locked truck at night. She is recruited through relatives, neighbours, or an informal broker into a private household where there is no written contract, no inspection, and little chance of rescue. Wages are delayed or withheld "for later."

Movement is restricted "for safety." Contact with home shrinks. Leaving becomes betrayal. What begins with consent gradually hardens into control. The ILO''s forced-labour indicators include abuse of vulnerability, deception, restriction of movement, isolation, violence, withholding of wages, abusive living conditions, debt bondage, and excessive overtime. Read that list against the realities of child domestic labour in Bangladesh and the resemblance is hard to ignore.

Imagine waking before dawn, before the house stirs. You clean quietly because noise is not allowed. You sweep floors you will never rest on. You wash dishes you did not eat from. There is no clock, only instructions. By the time the family wakes, hours of labour have already passed.
Imagine you are ten.

Mistakes are inevitable. When food is too salty, it is your fault. When something breaks, even if you never touch it, it is your fault. Correction begins with silence, then a look, then discipline, often explained as teaching. Punishment is placed where it will not show. You learn which parts of your body must remain covered.

You are locked inside when the family leaves, not as punishment but "for safety." You do not have a phone because you "do not need one." You eat last, whatever remains. You sleep on the floor, in the kitchen, beside the washing machine. School fades into memory. Home becomes unreachable.
Asking to leave is not simple. You are reminded of the money your parents received. Of the food you are given. Of the poverty you came from. Gratitude becomes an obligation. Obligation becomes confinement. You are not beaten every day. That would be easier to name. You are controlled every day. That is harder to see. And because there are no borders crossed, it is not called trafficking.

This is precisely the blind spot. Bangladesh still imagines trafficking as something that happens elsewhere: at borders, on boats, through fake visas, in brothels, or in labour migration scams. Yet the US State Department's 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report said Bangladesh continued to focus on international labour trafficking while giving less attention to internal trafficking, including bonded labour, domestic forced labour, sex trafficking, and the worst forms of child labour. To put it differently, the country is still better at spotting trafficking when it travels than when it lives in the next apartment.

The pool of vulnerability is enormous. Preliminary MICS 2025 findings released by UNICEF and the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics showed child labour at 9.2 percent among children aged 5 to 17, up from 6.8 percent in 2019, putting 1.2 million more children at risk. The National Child Labour Survey 2022 found 3.54 million working children nationwide, including 1.78 million in child labour and 1.07 million in hazardous child labour. Domestic work remains one of the sectors that absorbs this vulnerability because it is informal, hidden, and easy to rationalize as "help."

Even visible violence is only the surface. A Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies survey reported that 21 per cent of female domestic workers in Dhaka had faced physical abuse at work, 67 per cent mental torture, and 61 per cent verbal harassment. None of the respondents had an official employment agreement; 87 per cent reported getting no weekly holiday, and 91 per cent did not know the 999 hotline for gender-based violence.

Ain o Salish Kendra's monitoring for January to November 2025 recorded 15 reported incidents involving domestic workers, including physical torture, rape, suicide, and death after physical torture. The figures might look small and rarely come to the fore as a problem of national scale. Even so, the High Court on 19 April 2026 issued a rule asking the relevant government authorities to explain why the registration of domestic workers should not be made mandatory nationwide to ensure the safety of both workers and their employers.

There are signs the justice system is trying to catch up. In November 2025, the Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs, with UNODC and IOM support, launched a Bench Book to guide judges presiding over human trafficking tribunals toward more consistent, trauma-informed rulings. But intention on the bench means little without convictions: a Daily Star review of case-disposal records around the same period found roughly 95 percent of trafficking cases ending in acquittal, largely because smuggling and labour-exploitation cases were filed under a trafficking law that did not clearly define them, leaving prosecutors unable to make the charges stick.

That gap is part of what the country's new anti-trafficking law was built to close. Bangladesh''s interim government approved the Prevention and Suppression of Human Trafficking and Smuggling of Migrants Ordinance in late 2025, repealing the 2012 Act, and Parliament passed it into law in April 2026 after a review of all ordinances issued during the interim period.

The new law separates trafficking from migrant smuggling for the first time, ending years of cases being misfiled and lost to acquittal — and lets Anti-Human Trafficking Offence Tribunals prosecute connected crimes like assault and witness intimidation alongside the main charge, rather than forcing victims through multiple proceedings. It also bars prosecuting trafficking victims for acts committed as a direct consequence of being trafficked.

None of that, however, was written with a child silently scrubbing a kitchen floor in mind. The new ordinance was drafted to fix labour migration and cross-border smuggling cases, the kind that make it into court because someone crossed a border and can point to a recruiter. A child trafficked into the apartment next door rarely generates a case file at all, let alone one with the documentary trail these tribunals are built to examine.

Misidentification is exactly what happens when a child is recruited into a home through deception, but the case is treated only as cruelty in a private household rather than as exploitation within a trafficking framework.
The labour law has moved more slowly than the criminal one.

The Bangladesh Labour (Amendment) Ordinance, 2025 expanded the definition of "worker" to include domestic workers and seafarers, and the government presented the reform as part of its alignment with ILO standards after ratifying Conventions 155, 187, and 190. But recognition on paper is not protection in practice. At a 2025 policy dialogue on domestic labour, Bangladesh''s Labour Secretary acknowledged there is still no legal mandate requiring written contracts, that recruitment remains mostly informal, and that the Domestic Workers Protection and Welfare Policy of 2015 still lacks the force of law.

That is why recent cases matter so much. Pinky in Banani, the teenager in Barishal, the 11-year-old in Uttara. They do not simply show that employers can be cruel. They show how coercion is built. Poor families are persuaded by promises. Children are handed over without contracts. Wages are swallowed, redirected, or deferred. Phones disappear. Schooling ends. Movement is watched. Violence is explained as discipline. Dependence is cultivated until obedience feels like duty. In a factory, many of these signs would trigger alarms. Inside a home, they dissolve into the language of care.

A serious response starts by treating child domestic labour as not only a labour-rights issue, but a trafficking and child-protection issue under the new ordinance, which means training police, magistrates, and labour officials to recognise the same coercive indicators inside a household that they are already learning to recognise at a border.

Two changes would do more than any general checklist: giving the 2015 Domestic Workers Protection and Welfare Policy the force of law, with mandatory written contracts and a wage channel workers can access without going through their employer; and extending the new ordinance's National Referral Mechanism, built for cross-border trafficking victims, to cover children identified inside domestic households, so a rescued child is routed into the same protection system as a rescued migrant, not left to a single NGO or police station to sort out informally.

The argument is not that every domestic work arrangement is trafficking. It is that Bangladesh has normalized enough deception, dependence, restriction, and violence in domestic labour that it keeps failing to recognise trafficking when it appears in its most ordinary form: a poor girl in someone else's kitchen.

What this crisis demands now is not sympathy alone, but a system. The government must enforce contracts, regulate recruitment, and treat child domestic labour and coercive household servitude as potential trafficking, not private misfortune. But the state does not have to do this alone. Civil society organisations can help build the missing bridge between law and reality: training police and frontline officials to spot forced-labour indicators, helping identify victims early, linking survivors to shelter, medical care and legal aid, supporting case documentation, and strengthening referrals so that one rescued child does not disappear back into the same cycle.

Bangladesh does not need a parallel justice system; it needs a stronger one, backed by organisations willing to work alongside public institutions until protection is not exceptional, but routine.

* Md. Mohiuddin Abir is an expert in justice system response, child protection, and anti-trafficking, working at the intersection of research, policy, and program strategy with a focus on methodological rigor and institutional accountability. He can be reached at [email protected] or on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/mohiuddin-abir/

* The views expressed here are the author's own.