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by her employer. When her employer found out she was pregnant, he kicked her out
of the house and she ended up in jail. After three weeks, Meskit found Sama's number
and called for her assistance. Over the next three months Sama was able to persuade the
authorities to let her out of jail and helped her to procure a new working visa. Today,
Meskit is working as a nanny and lives in Dubai with her son. “She has helped so many
Ethiopian women like me, but she is exhausted, it's getting harder and harder to do her
kind of work.”
Sama is tired from battling the global and local notions about human trafficking that
combine to put undue pressure on female migrants in the UAE, while also eclipsing her
efforts. She is tired because international policies as championed in the
Trafficking in
Persons Report
have hindered her efforts to create and mobilize a civil society in the
UAEtomeettheneedsofmigrantworkers,traffickedornot.SamawasborninEthiopia
and raised in refugee camps in Somalia and Italy. As an adult, she lived in Canada
briefly before moving to Dubai in 2003. She says that it was her experience being a
refugee and then a migrant worker in Italy and Canada that made her interested in form-
ing an ad hoc social support group to help African women who have become migrant
workers around the world. A tall woman with kind eyes, she speaks seven languages
fluently and uses her linguistic skills to help translate for women who are facing legal
troubles or are mired in court cases.
“The problem is that your George Bush and the Americans made trafficking so polit-
ical. On top of that they made it so that all trafficking is sex trafficking, so what does
that do? It makes people racist, it makes people think that any Ethiopian woman here is
a sex worker, or has been trafficked, and is a criminal,” she explained. Every day Sama
works with Ethiopian women who have been arrested for absconding from their jobs,
overstayingtheirvisas,accruingdebt,orworkingassexworkers.Shesaysthatthepoin-
ted focus on sex trafficking within the TIP and in United Nations documents such as
the
UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons
(2003)(which
operates under the umbrella of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime) has constructed the
trafficking issue as a criminal matter in the minds of locals and UAE law enforcement.
Sama is frustrated that members of law enforcement assume that women from certain
nationalities must all be guilty. She is angered that local and international authorities ar-
ticulate andreproduce local racialized andgendered hierarchies rather thanapproaching
labor and migration issues within a human rights framework. She is also angered by in-
ternational policies, such as those advocated in the TIP report, that consider all abused
migrant women to be sex workers and, by default, criminals. Thus any migrant worker
seeking assistance is first taken to jail for questioning. “The worst part is that they don't
even get good translators for these women. They— the police, or the judges—they have
made up their minds about Ethiopian women, and they get people to translate for them
