> Although the family has agreed to compensate her, Maria, who lived in near-total isolation and without contact with her relatives, will remain with her employers
What the fuck?
Why did the law need the family's "agreement"??
Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??
Oh wow, I didn't realize this was already 9 years old. One of the essays of all time.
Certainly provides some perspective on why Brazil might let that woman stay with the family that enslaved her. Granted, Lola's case is unique because she was taken halfway around the world and was an undocumented immigrant for decades. It sounds like that's not the case for this woman in Brazil, but there's a lot we don't know.
I've seen what might be a similar social dynamic in very long, but abusive marriages in the US. A person can understand intellectually that they could have a better life elsewhere, but this has been their life for so long that conceiving of what that life might be like is impossible, or terrifying at best. I resent the abuser no less, but it's hard to know what to make of all of it.
Its a common occurrence for families to take in poor girls to do house work in exchange for food and lodging. And with the insidious nature of Brazilian racism, they will pretend that she is part of the family. They might even take her on vacations (to work, of course). If you grow up with this mentality it might even be hard for you to see the injustice. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, decades after its neighbours. The slaves never got compensation but their owners did.
I will say it was common up to the end of 70s and somewhat into the 80s.
Common here I don't mean that every single person would have a "slave child" at home but you'd know someone or someone that knew someone who did it.
I am not saying it justify this horrible behaviour, but mostly as to say how much worse it could get.
Some would just be "Cinderella" style abuse, but other would be physically and sexually abused.
Some reform of policies around de 90s cleared much of the evil practice.
I think by today standards, 99% of people knowing this would have denounced this much earlier. The fact it did not happen in this case is because this family is related to a powerful politician of the region.
Compensation they offer is too little and too disrespectful. It is basically 3 USD a week for the past half decade of forced work relationship.
First, it would need to be at least 100x more than that and it would need to put this rubbish in form of people into jail for the rest of their lives.
> they will pretend that she is part of the family
Wasn't there some mild scandal a decade or so ago where wealthy white American families would adopt kids from Africa or Mexico, only to force them to do housework the whole time?
If you found that movie interesting, check out The Second Mother (Que Horas ela Volta?) which is a Brazilian movie about a maid and her relationship with the middle class family that employs her.
Hot take: As bad as this is, I wonder if it would be kinder to leave her with the family for the rest of her life.
This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are.
Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.
I was talking to a doctor who went to medical school in Brazil and said it was normal for upper-middle class people to have a live-in domestic servant. Many of the floorplans for condos or houses include a servants quarters. They were telling me theirs cost around $12 USD a day which is not a bad deal.
It's a symptom of inequality. It will start happening more and more even in the first world if inequality isn't tackled and wealth continues to concentrate.
The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?
Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.
I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.
Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.
(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)
How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.
The practice of live-in maids has been somewhat common throughout the world up until WWI and into WWII. Well-to-do families would taken in boys and girls from poor families and use them for house and yard work. It wasn’t slavery, or even indentured servitudes, but it did take opportunity of their misfortune. Aristocrats and well to dos would take girls and boys mostly from the less educated countryside or from war-torn areas of the rest of Europe and use them as cheap labor. Some would stay on and some would go off to seek better future outside those families. It was somewhat symbiotic the poor kids (and their families) needed the money and the wealthy could show off they had money to spend on domestic help.
I am a brazilian doctor. Yeah, richer people are very likely to hire staff to manage their homes. It's not a rule, but it's not rare for them to live in the house they work at. This is common enough to show up as a trope in popular telenovelas.
I've yet to uncover a case of literal slavery like TFA though. One could argue the workers aren't getting paid enough and I'd agree, but the workers are getting paid.
> whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now
Here’s the thing: you can’t keep someone isolated for 55 years, working them without pay—regardless of whether the victim thinks that they want it or not.
My wife's family were wealthy Chinese near Hong Kong. Her grandmother took in a poor girl as a servant. She was part of the family but also basically a slave. The grandmother arranged her marriage when the girl was older. We met the girls granddaughter when we visited china - she was a new college student. The two families still think of themselves as related.
Almost same story (except china), my grandmother lost her parents very young. A family took her in and she worked for them until 20 years old or something then she got married.
Those of us that soldered wires, wrote custom drivers for esoteric hardware, and played with crazy things in the garage recognize that social systems are hackable too.
Welcome to HN! You’ll find that a lot of the readers and commenters here don’t view technology as an isolated field, that it interconnects with all sorts of other systems—sociology, politics, entertainment, manufacturing, business, and so on.
at the bottom of the page there is guidelines and FAQ
they also give good indication on how to handle topics that don't tickle your personal preferences (for "interesting" or "curious"): silently ignore them
especially if interest is the guidance on downvoting and flagging. the sorting is not according to your personal preferences, as in "social media", but according to the hn hive think. thus negative voting indicates "anti-curious", "anti-conversation", not dislike.
Welcome to Hacker News. Such submissions are mostly not on-topic according to the HN guidelines linked at the bottom of the page but there are persistent activist users who try to drag off-topic social issues onto Hacker News when the opportunity presents itself under the thin pretext that "everything is political". Most such submissions don't have the momentum to reach the HN front page but occasionally one does.
The joke's on them; it likely erodes support for their causes.
Submitter here. As per HN guidelines: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
This playing out across generations of the family that kept her, the woman 'rescued' but staying with them for the time being, the social context, income levels, how to keep a slave from leaving in today's ultra-connected world, the low $ damages mentioned, relation with other modern forms of slavery...
"Statistics suggest that Maria was undoubtedly poor and, most likely, Black."
That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics".
Where else can we apply this technique?
"Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup."
Good to know.
"The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace."
Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building.
Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".
At first I found interesting how you nitpick in irrelevant details while ignoring the bigger picture.
The point of the whole article is to use a single case to illustrate a bigger picture that you seem to deliberately oversee: abuse and exploitation of manual and unqualified workers.
But, then, I saw your Brazilian name and understood. Brazilian jingoism freaks out when Brazil "looks bad" to the world. It is a very common reaction among 3rd world countries. Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, etc are just like that too.
What disgusting subhumans. They should rot in jail until they close their eyes.
Nobody can tell me that such a life is not exploiting and slavery.
They dont need to play stupid and pay a laughable amount of money for a destroyed life.
But thats how some people got rich...pretty disgusting.
Yup, my mom and her sisters were all sent off to work on family houses when they were about 10 - 12. They were born in the country side, and my grandpa didn't care for them at all.
I see a lot of comments claiming that slavery was abolished. It was not, we just made the transition to another form of slavery, one where most people think they are free. In reality, they work every day while most of their earnings are taken from them by force every month ('taxation'). The well known slave Frederik Douglas was one of the first examples of this. Douglas made a deal with his master to do whatever he liked as long as he gave his master a cut. The same dynamic is now implemented worldwide. Watch the movie Jones Plantation.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26964727/
She will re receive a compensation of 50.000 reais.
Which on every, with current exchange rate should be about 3 USD per week of work.
One can't get a better bargain for a slave!
45 comments
[ 1022 ms ] story [ 2565 ms ] threadWhat the fuck?
Why did the law need the family's "agreement"??
Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??
Certainly provides some perspective on why Brazil might let that woman stay with the family that enslaved her. Granted, Lola's case is unique because she was taken halfway around the world and was an undocumented immigrant for decades. It sounds like that's not the case for this woman in Brazil, but there's a lot we don't know.
I've seen what might be a similar social dynamic in very long, but abusive marriages in the US. A person can understand intellectually that they could have a better life elsewhere, but this has been their life for so long that conceiving of what that life might be like is impossible, or terrifying at best. I resent the abuser no less, but it's hard to know what to make of all of it.
I will say it was common up to the end of 70s and somewhat into the 80s. Common here I don't mean that every single person would have a "slave child" at home but you'd know someone or someone that knew someone who did it.
I am not saying it justify this horrible behaviour, but mostly as to say how much worse it could get. Some would just be "Cinderella" style abuse, but other would be physically and sexually abused.
Some reform of policies around de 90s cleared much of the evil practice.
I think by today standards, 99% of people knowing this would have denounced this much earlier. The fact it did not happen in this case is because this family is related to a powerful politician of the region.
Compensation they offer is too little and too disrespectful. It is basically 3 USD a week for the past half decade of forced work relationship. First, it would need to be at least 100x more than that and it would need to put this rubbish in form of people into jail for the rest of their lives.
Wasn't there some mild scandal a decade or so ago where wealthy white American families would adopt kids from Africa or Mexico, only to force them to do housework the whole time?
This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are.
Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.
Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.
I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.
Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.
(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)
How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.
I've yet to uncover a case of literal slavery like TFA though. One could argue the workers aren't getting paid enough and I'd agree, but the workers are getting paid.
Here’s the thing: you can’t keep someone isolated for 55 years, working them without pay—regardless of whether the victim thinks that they want it or not.
they also give good indication on how to handle topics that don't tickle your personal preferences (for "interesting" or "curious"): silently ignore them
especially if interest is the guidance on downvoting and flagging. the sorting is not according to your personal preferences, as in "social media", but according to the hn hive think. thus negative voting indicates "anti-curious", "anti-conversation", not dislike.
The joke's on them; it likely erodes support for their causes.
This playing out across generations of the family that kept her, the woman 'rescued' but staying with them for the time being, the social context, income levels, how to keep a slave from leaving in today's ultra-connected world, the low $ damages mentioned, relation with other modern forms of slavery...
Plenty to go on there. Btw welcome to HN!
That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics".
Where else can we apply this technique?
"Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup."
Good to know.
"The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace."
Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building.
Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".
The point of the whole article is to use a single case to illustrate a bigger picture that you seem to deliberately oversee: abuse and exploitation of manual and unqualified workers.
But, then, I saw your Brazilian name and understood. Brazilian jingoism freaks out when Brazil "looks bad" to the world. It is a very common reaction among 3rd world countries. Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, etc are just like that too.