A couple living in Yangon’s Yuzana Garden City were arrested over the weekend for physically abusing their 13-year-old domestic helper.
The girl was rushed to the Thingangyun General Hospital on June 4 – a day after her employers – Htun Htun and Myat Noe Thu – allegedly branded her with a clothing iron, poured boiling water over her body, beat her face, and repeatedly pricked her lips with needles.The accused torturers remain in police detention and are being investigated under suspicion of committing “voluntary acts of violence” against their young employee.
In a similar case that came to light in May 2016, six members of a family who were charged for abusing and withholding wages from their two domestic helpers for five years, starting from when the girls were 11 and 12 years old.
The accused abusers sought to avoid jail time by paying the victims a settlement of around US$4,000, which was brokered by the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission. Following public outcry over the what was seen as an insufficient penalty for the abusers, four commissioners resigned, and the cases were reopened.
In November that same year, another couple living in a village near Tachileik was charged under sections 294, 325, 326 of the Penal Code after they were discovered to have been torturing their adopted daughter. They were accused of pouring hot water on the child, starving her, scratching her hip with needles, poking her vagina with the tip of a knife, and hitting her head until her scalp bled.
Risk analysis firm Verisk Maplecroft declared Myanmar the world’s seventh-worst for child labor, just ahead of India and Liberia. One in five children aged 10 to 17 – around 1.7 million people – are working, according to UN analysis of Myanmar’s 2014 census data.
