Domestic workers in Southeast Asia, predominantly women from Indonesia and the Philippines, have long been caught at the intersection of economic insecurity, gender discrimination, and harsh migration regimes.

Migration for domestic workers is often framed in purely economic terms: higher wages abroad, remittances sent home and financial empowerment. But this framing hides highly precarious labour conditions, domestic workers’ emotional stresses from prolonged absence, such as having to mother their children and mediate family disputes over the phone, and the obligation to send almost all their money home for school fees, medical bills, or land payments.

Beyond these well-documented features of migrant worker existence, female domestic workers also are increasingly subject to technology-facilitated sexual violence.

Technology-facilitated sexual violence meets labour insecurity

Technology-facilitated sexual violence has emerged as a growing and pervasive, yet under-acknowledged, threat to migrant workers’ safety, dignity, and livelihoods in the Indo-Pacific.  Technology-facilitated sexual violence refers to a range of sexual harm or abuse conducted through digital technology, including digital surveillance, sextortion, deepfake pornography and unsolicited sexual messaging. For many migrant women, technology-facilitated sexual violence is used directly by their employers.

This picture emerges from extensive field research in Kuala Lumpur conducted from May to August 2024. It included one-on-one interviews with seven Filipino domestic workers, one Indonesian domestic worker and five NGO workers involved in women’s and migrants’ rights. The research also included separate focus group discussions with Indonesian and Filipino migrant domestic workers.

Salma*, an Indonesian domestic worker, stated that her employer installed CCTV cameras throughout the house in which she worked. She broke them in defiance, but new ones were installed. 

Juno*, a Filipina domestic worker, explained bluntly: “Inside the house of the employers, when your room or your toilet has CCTV, it’s a form of sexual harassment.”

Rani*, an Indonesian domestic worker, shared the story of a friend (also a domestic migrant worker) whose employer had installed CCTV cameras in the bathroom she used. The employer told her she was “so beautiful” and that he could see her naked on the footage. When she refused his sexual advances, he threatened to release the video. She resisted, threatening to go to the police.

Aubrey*, an Indonesian domestic worker, was subject to sextortion. She received a WhatsApp message from an unknown number stating that the sender had created a pornographic deepfake video using her 22-year-old daughter’s face. The sender demanded approximately 2 million rupiah ($182) almost a month’s wages, to prevent its release. She refused to pay, and the sender demanded more than twice as much. She eventually threatened police action, after which the messages stopped, but the incident left her shaken.

Darcy*, a Filipina domestic worker, was approached by an unknown man on Facebook who demanded intimate photos of her. When she refused, he sent her explicit videos of himself. She blocked him but chose not to report the incident, stating “what I fear the most is to get blamed by others.”

Gabriella*, another Filipina domestic worker, described how she receives sexual messages and unsolicited photos of male genitals approximately twice a year through unknown senders on WhatsApp and Instagram. The messages often go further, with men asking her for sex. She blocks and deletes the accounts but stated: “As a woman, I feel harassed […] because it doesn’t happen just once.”

Gaps in legal protection

Migrant domestic workers remain excluded from many formal protections in their host countries.

Malaysia’s legal framework for migrant workers, the Immigration Act 1959/63 focuses heavily on regulating entry, residence, and deportation of migrants rather than their rights. The Employment Act 1955 includes sexual harassment provisions, but migrant domestic workers are not defined as “employees” in the same way as workers in offices, factories, or other formal business settings. The 2022 Anti-Sexual Harassment Act offers legal recourse in theory, but most migrants lack the knowledge, status, or resources to navigate the justice system. Existing laws also struggle to address new realms of harassment, such as technology-enabled abuse. Digital surveillance, sextortion, unsolicited sexual messaging, and deepfake pornography often fall into legal grey areas, as they are not clearly defined or categorised under traditional harassment statutes or electronic transmissions law.  Paired with cultural restraints related to shame and victim blaming in relation to sexual violence (malu and hiya), migrant women fear damage to their reputation.

Civil society organisations, such as Our Journey, Tenaganita, and North-South Initiative, have tried to step into these legal gaps. They provide legal aid, shelter, and advocacy where possible, and some now incorporate digital safety into their training. Yet resources are scarce, and instances of online harassment are often deprioritised relative to actual physical abuse. Sending-country employment agencies, meanwhile, continue to prioritise wage disputes over issues such as technology facilitated sexual violence.

Rethinking social protection

The experiences of migrant domestic workers in Kuala Lumpur suggest that the experience of technology-facilitated sexual violence and a lack of legal recourse is widespread in Southeast Asia.  Large numbers of women migrate for domestic work within ASEAN often into legal systems that exclude them from labor protections and provide few remedies for technology-related abuse. Unlike regions with binding human rights mechanisms such as the European Union, the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights lacks enforcement power. Gender and class-based hierarchies, combined with ethno-national biases toward migrant workers (often stigmatised as “foreign maids”) normalise abuse and discourage reporting. These social dynamics are broadly consistent across ASEAN receiving countries.

Policy reforms could include extending core labour rights to domestic workers; integrating digital safety into pre-departure training; guaranteeing unrestricted phone access for domestic workers in employment contracts; expanding international cooperation and domestic protections on technology-facilitated abuse; and ensuring that mental health services are accessible to migrants. It also requires robust initiatives to challenge long held cultural and social norms that perpetuate patriarchal, racist, and classist violence against migrant women.  

The stories of migrant domestic workers make clear that the intersection of labour insecurity, digital harassment, and gender discrimination cannot be treated as isolated problems. They are mutually reinforcing dynamics, leaving women vulnerable across physical, emotional, and digital spaces. To speak of resilience without recognising this reality risks celebrating survival while ignoring the structures that produce harm.

*All names are pseudonyms

Ashlynn Chand researches digital sexual violence faced by migrant womenworkers in Malaysia and the impact of technology-facilitated sexual violence in the Global South. A former freelance reporter and editor, she is graduated with masters degree in Development Studies at York University Centre for Asian Research.

This article is part of a special series published by Asialink’s Insights and the Asia Institute’s Melbourne Asia Review.

Main image: Multiple blurred person face on tablet screen, covering true identity. Credit: Collagery/Shutterstock.