IRVINE, Calif. — Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door.
They watched through their window as the child rinsed plates under the faucet. She wasn’t much taller than the counter, and the soapy water swallowed her slender arms. To put the dishes away, she climbed onto a chair.
But she was not the daughter of the couple next door doing chores. She was their maid.
Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family’s crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off.
The trafficking of children for domestic labor in the U.S. is an extension of an illegal but common practice in Africa. Families in remote villages send their daughters to work in cities for extra money and the opportunity to escape a dead-end life. Some girls work for free on the understanding that they will at least be better fed in the home of their employer.
The custom has led to the spread of trafficking, as well-to-do Africans accustomed to employing children immigrate to the U.S.
Around one-third of the estimated 10,000 forced laborers in the U.S. are servants trapped behind the curtains of suburban homes, according to a study by the National Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley and Free the Slaves, a nonprofit group. No one can say how many are children, especially since their work can so easily be masked as chores.
Unknown to their neighbors, they live as modern-day slaves, just like Shyima, whose story is pieced together through court records, police transcripts and interviews.
“I’d look down and see her at 10, 11 — even 12 — at night,” said Shyima’s neighbor at the time, Tina Font. “She’d be doing the dishes. We didn’t put two and two together.”
Leased for 10 years
Shyima cried when she found out she was going to America in 2000. Her father, a bricklayer, had fallen ill, so her mother found a maid recruiter, signed a contract effectively leasing her daughter to the couple for 10 years and told Shyima to be strong.
For a year, Shyima, 9, worked in the Cairo apartment owned by Amal Motelib and Nasser Ibrahim. Every month, Shyima’s mother came to pick up her salary.
Tens of thousands of children in Africa, some as young as 3, are recruited every year to work as domestic servants. They are on call 24 hours a day and are often beaten if they make a mistake.
The U.S. State Department found that over the past year, children have been trafficked to work as servants in at least 33 of Africa’s 53 countries. Children from at least 10 African countries were sent as maids to the U.S. and Europe. But the problem is so well hidden that authorities — including the U.N., Interpol and the State Department — have no idea how many child maids now work in the West.
By the time the Ibrahims decided to leave, Shyima’s family had taken several loans from them for medical bills. The Ibrahims said they could be repaid only by sending Shyima to work for them in the U.S. A friend posed as her father, and the U.S. Embassy in Cairo issued her a six-month tourist visa.
She arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on Aug. 3, 2000, according to court documents. The family brought her back to their spacious home. She was told to sleep in the garage. It had no windows and was neither heated nor air-conditioned.
Soon after she arrived, the garage’s only light bulb went out. The Ibrahims didn’t replace it. From then on, Shyima lived in the dark.
It never occurred to her to run away. “I thought this was normal,” she said.
Even though many child maids are physically abused, child labor is rarely prosecuted because the work isn’t considered strenuous. Many employers even see themselves as benefactors.
“There is a sense that children should work to help their family but also that they are being given an opportunity,” said Mark Lagon, director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
Shyima’s mother, Salwa Mahmoud, said her father believed she would have better opportunities in America.
“I didn’t want her to travel, but our family’s condition dictated that she had to go,” explained Mahmoud.
“If she had stayed here in Egypt, she would have been ordinary,” said Awatef, Shyima’s older sister. “Just like us.”
Told not to reveal anything
On April 3, 2002, an anonymous caller phoned the California Department of Social Services to report that a young girl was living inside the garage of 28 Pacific Grove.
A few days later, Nasser Ibrahim opened the door to a detective from the Irvine Police Department. Asked if any children lived there besides his own, he first said no, then yes — “a distant relative.” He said he had “not yet” enrolled her in school. She did “chores — just like the other kids,” according to the police transcript.
Shyima was upstairs cleaning when Ibrahim came to get her.
“He told me that I was not allowed to say anything,” said Shyima. “That if I said anything, I would never see my parents again.”
For months, Shyima lied to investigators, saying what the Ibrahims had told her to say.
Investigators arranged for her to speak to her parents. She told them she felt like a “nobody” working for the Ibrahims and wanted to come home. Her father yelled at her.
During the 2006 trial, Madame Amal told the judge it would be unfair to separate her from her children. Enraged, Shyima, then 17, told the court she hadn’t seen her family in years.
“Where was their loving when it came to me? Wasn’t I a human being too? I felt like I was nothing when I was with them,” she sobbed.
The couple pleaded guilty to all charges, including forced labor and slavery. They were ordered to pay $76,000, the amount Shyima would have earned at the minimum wage.
The sentence: three years in federal prison for Ibrahim, 22 months for his wife, and then deportation for both.
Their lawyers declined to comment for this story.
