UAE: Women's Rights...you must be smoking camel $8!$$ again!

Female domestic workers in the UAE suffer unpaid wages, food deprivation, long working hours, forced confinement, and physical or sexual abuse.

The Indonesian embassy registered a 24 percent increase in domestic worker exploitation incidents in Abu Dhabi.

Reports have emerged of a Sri Lanken maid whose employers hammered 23 nails into her body as punishment for not doing enough work.

In another three reports a maid killed herself by jumping off a balcony after being raped. The second maid killed herself by swallowing bleach on finding she was pregnant. The third maid attempted to kill herself by taking a massive drug overdose after being gang-raped.

Makeshift shelters in Abu Dhabi and Dubai housed more than 300 runaway Filipina domestic workers.

Despite the existence of shelters and hotlines to help protect women, domestic violence remains a pervasive problem. The penal code gives men the legal right to discipline their wives and children, including through the use of physical violence. In October 2010 the Federal Supreme Court issued a ruling that upheld a husband's right to "chastise" his wife and children with physical abuse.

In January 2011, a UAE court charged 23-year-old British woman and her fiance with having illegal sex and drinking outside permitted premises after the woman reported to police that a hotel employee had raped her. In June the Abu Dhabi criminal court sentenced an 18-year-old Emirati woman to a year in prison for illicit sex after she complained that six men gang-raped her a month earlier.

According to a survey conducted of 980 UAE residents, 55 percent of the female respondents said they would not report a sexual assault for fear of arrest, and 49 percent would not do so because society would judge them harshly.