Remember the Long Island millionaire couple convicted of enslaving two domestic workers they had brought to the U.S. from Indonesia? Although this story got much more media attention than other similar occurrences, it is far from an isolated event.
An estimated 100 million women, mostly from the world’s lesser-developed countries, leave their homes each year and migrate abroad in the hopes of finding a better life. Many of these female migrants turn to domestic work as a means of supporting themselves and their families back home. Unfortunately, language barriers, immigration status, isolation in the home, lack of education, and gender make these women extremely vulnerable and a serious pattern of exploitation and abuse of migrant domestic workers exists around the world. From Southeast Asia to the Middle East, South America to the United States, female domestic workers are routinely trafficked and subjected to conditions of forced labor and servitude.
On Tuesday evening, Joanna Rudnick joined the ACLU at Tribeca Cinemas to screen her award-winning documentary film, In the Family, and discuss the patenting of human genes, a practice that has serious implications for women like Joanna who have a genetic predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer. You can see photos from the event 