Imagine not having the money to pay your children’s school fees, rainproof your home, or ensure a loved one can get lifesaving medical treatment. Then imagine you live in a country wracked by unemployment with no jobs in sight. A community member offers you a job abroad with what seems like a dazzling foreign salary. You must leave your family behind for two years, and pay initial fees that leave you with large debts, but you hope the investment will pay off and transform your family’s life.

Millions of women from South and Southeast Asia migrate for domestic work for these reasons. I have spent the past decade documenting the array of abuses that often confront them when migrating to destinations in Asia and the Middle East. They are a segment of the estimated 50-100million people—mostly women and girls—who work as nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers worldwide, some in their own countries and some by migrating abroad.

I first got involved in activism around migrant domestic workers’ rights as a volunteer for Andolan, a small community-based group organizing primarily Bangladeshi domestic workers in Queens, New York City. We held our meetings sitting on the living-room floor of the lead organizer, a former domestic worker named Nahar Alam. In response to cases of immigrant women being paid as little as $200 per month for working around the clock or having their passports taken, we organized street protests against diplomats who abused their domestic workers with impunity, linked survivors of abuse with pro bono legal assistance, and conducted outreach to raise awareness about migrant workers’ rights.

As a researcher for Human Rights Watch, I learned that these problems were much more widespread than I could have ever dreamed.