At least 1,30,000 migrant domestic workers, many of them Bangladeshis, are trapped in slavish employment in Oman, with their plight unexposed within closed doors,  Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released on Wednesday.

The 68-page report, titled ‘I Was Sold: Abuse and Exploitation of Migrant Domestic Workers in Oman,’ documents how Oman’s kafala (sponsorship) immigrant labour system and lack of labour law protections leave migrant domestic workers exposed to abuse and exploitation by employers, whose consent they need to change jobs, reports UNB.

HRW interviewed 59 migrant domestic workers in Oman.

In some cases, workers described abuses that amounted to forced labour or trafficking– often across Oman’s porous border with the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

‘Migrant domestic workers in Oman are bound to their employers and left to their mercy,’ said Rotna Begum, Middle East women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Employers can force domestic workers to work without rest, pay, or food, knowing they can be punished if they escape, while the employers rarely face penalties, she added.

Most of the workers said their employers took away their passports, according to the report.

Many said their employers did not pay them their full salaries, forced them to work excessively for long hours without breaks or days off, or denied them adequate food and living conditions.

Some also accused their employers of abusing them psychically; a few of them narrated stories of sexual abuse.

Asma K, from Bangladesh, said she went to the UAE for work, but her recruitment agent ‘sold’ her to a man who took away her passport and took her to Oman.

He forced her to work 21 hours a day for a family of 15 with no rest or day off, deprived her of food, verbally abused and sexually harassed her and paid her nothing.

‘I would start working at 4:30am and finish at 1am,’ she said. ‘For the entire day they wouldn’t let me sit. When I said I want to leave, he said, ‘I bought you for 1,560 rials (USD 4,052) from Dubai. Give it back to me and then you can go.’

Another Bangladeshi domestic worker Mamata B. said that in April, 2015 she told the police that her employer had beat her and refused to pay her for two months.

Although she begged not to be sent back, the police called her employer, who took her back and beat her ‘mercilessly,’ then locked her in a room for eight days with only dates and water as sustenance.

Mamata fled again, but did not return to the police.