Cases of child abuse revealed usually when kids are mature enough to talk about it
By
Estelle Low
Indonesian maid Dwi Susilowati showing her self-inflicted injury. Ms Dwi hammered needles into her own stomach and also drank detergent water to make herself sick so that she could be sent back home to Solo in central Java. -- PHOTO: THE NEW PAPER
A RECENT YouTube video clip showed a maid abusing a toddler in Malaysia.
The two-minute clip, posted on Straits Times' online portal Stomp on April 2, got netizens here asking: How prevalent is such child abuse?
TELL-TALE SIGNS
SOME indicators that may suggest an emotionally or psychologically abused child:
Private school student Sandra (not her real name), now 18, was a victim of child abuse by her maid for eight years.
It started when she was five, soon after her working parents got a Filipino maid to care for her and her then nine-year-old sister.
Sandra said the maid first gained her parents' trust by appearing to be caring.
Then each time the girls did not finish their food, she caned them. That was not all.
'Once, she took a chopper and chased my sister around the house when she came home late from school,' Sandra said.
That happened when the girls were 14 and 10.
Emboldened, the maid moonlighted as a housekeeper elsewhere. Sandra had to tag along at times - to help mop and sweep the floor. She also made Sandra steal money from her mother.
'If I didn't help her, she would make me massage her for an hour before I could sleep,' she said.
Read the full story in today's edition of The Sunday Times.
