'Modern-Day Slavery' Prompts Rescue Efforts

With the help of a friend, the maid negotiated with the embassy to reach a monetary settlement last year, but the parties agreed to keep the amount secret, according to the advocacy group.

Chaumtoli Huq, a New York lawyer who won a settlement for the Bangladeshi maid to the Bahraini U.N. diplomat, argues that diplomatic immunity should not take precedence over the constitutional prohibition against slavery and indentured servitude.

"Why should the worker, the lowest of the low, have to bear the burden of immunity?" she said.

Trying Not to Think About It

Domestic servitude cases are difficult to prosecute, law enforcement officials say, because the victims are scared to go to police and the crimes take place behind closed doors. But in Maryland, the U.S. attorney's office in Greenbelt has prosecuted six domestic worker cases in the past four years, all in Montgomery County.

One couple, Louisa Satia and her husband, Kevin Nanji, were each sentenced by a federal judge in Greenbelt to nine years in prison for enslaving a 14-year-old Cameroonian girl in Silver Spring. The couple smuggled the girl into the United States in January 1997, according to court documents and interviews. They promised to send her to school in exchange for domestic work. Instead, she was forced to cook, care for the children and clean. For three years, she was never paid and never sent to school.

Nanji sexually abused her, according to sentencing documents. She wore sweatpants and jeans to bed to make it more difficult for him to take her clothes off. "I would wait for him to go to bed until I could go to sleep," said the worker, now 21, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she did not want friends to know of the assaults.

She wanted to run away, but she had no money or passport. Satia warned her repeatedly that the police would send her away because she had no "papers," according to court documents.

Nearly three years after she arrived in the United States, on the day before Thanksgiving, she fled, shoeless and coatless. She said she begged a woman in the neighborhood for shoes. "She gave me a pair of black flip-flops," she recalled.

She ran to a nearby Kmart and hid in the ladies' room before calling an acquaintance of Nanji's, who found her temporary housing. CASA came to her aid after learning about her from another Cameroonian domestic worker.

Authorities were able to prosecute because immigration investigators found witnesses and travel and bank records supporting their case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mythili Raman said.

"I try not to think about" what happened, the young woman said. She now is a part-time clerk at an Office Depot. She has received none of the $105,306 in back wages the judge ordered the couple to pay. She is thinking about becoming a geriatric nurse. But first, she wants to earn her high school equivalency degree, a substitute for the education she was promised but never received.

Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.