Introduction

The labour conditions of workers in the Arabic-speaking Persian Gulf are under considerable scrutiny, and domestic workers are thought to be particularly vulnerable. Recently, Amnesty International found that some domestic workers are abused, over-worked, and not compensated for their work (Amnesty International 2014). Transnational institutions, such as Amnesty International and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), argue that a central contributing factor to the abuse of domestic workers is the prevalence of trafficking in the Arabian Sea. Trafficking of persons to the Gulf countries, according to the United Nations, leads to the exploitation of workers’ physical and sexual labour (United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women 2014). In the worst cases, poor women from South Asia or the Philippines are recruited to work in the Gulf by people who promise them good paying jobs. In these scenarios, after women arrive in the Gulf, they are treated poorly by their employer and not paid for their work. They are unable to return to their home countries due to a lack of funds, the large amounts of debt borrowed to pay for their emigration, and/or physical restrictions on their movements from their employers. In discussions by Amnesty International and other nongovernmental organizations, the exploitation of trafficked women is often explained as largely the result of the practices used to exclude non-citizens in the Arabic-speaking countries of the Persian Gulf.