A Pakistani-American family living in the United States of America (USA) has been sentenced on Monday to serve between five to twelve years in jail for physical violence and forced labor inflicted upon a Pakistani woman. Federal authorities have described this case as the ‘modern-day equivalence of slavery’.
As reported by US newspaper Richmond Times, the three defendants, matriarch Zahida Aman along with her two sons, Mohammad Rehan Chaudhri (49) and Mohammad Nauman Chaudhri (55), had used physical labor, verbal abuse and coercion against the survivor, Maria Butt, to get her to serve thousands of hours of domestic labor ‘for 12 long years’, said federal authorities in a statement.
“Indeed, during the course of their illegal agreement and in furtherance of their criminal conspiracy, each defendant assaulted, verbally attacked and abused [the victim’s] children to carefully construct a climate of fear that continuously compelled her labor,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Stephen Miller and Shea Gibbons revealed in a court statement.
Butt was married to Salman Chaudhri, the eldest son of Aman in January 2002 when she was living in Pakistan. She claimed that she had not met her husband before their marriage. After moving to the United States, Butt recalled her husband telling her that if she wanted to keep him happy, then she must fulfil the obligations of his family.
Shortly after moving to the US, Butt was called in a family meeting by Aman where the victim was asked to surrender her legal documents, including the jewlery gifted by her family, as well as a notebook listing the contact numbers of her family members back home.
Prosecutors note that due to this act, the survivor “had no legal documentation, assets of value or contact information for her family and friends within months of arriving in the United States. She was becoming completely dependent on the defendants for basic necessities and emotional support.”
After her arrival, the survivor was forced to perform an endless amount of housework which included cleaning bedrooms, wiping down the kitchen and, as prosecuters pointed out, had ‘become a robot of the house’ who basically had to respond to all of the requests of the family members.
Soon, the survivor was made to perform incredibly difficult tasks like moving the lawn with a push mover, hand-washing and line-drying area rugs, including painting the inside and outside of the family’s two-storey house. When she would refuse, the survivor was slapped or subjected to cruel punishments like in one instance, she was tied with rope and pushed down the stairs infrount of her children for simply using a family member’s phone to call her husband.
“As the type of work the defendants required [the victim] to perform intensified, so too did the coercive scheme they employed to compel her labor,” prosecutors said in the trial brief. “The defendants used a combination of coercive means, including physical assaults, verbal abuse, isolation, starvation and threats of deportation to create a climate of fear that compelled [the victim’s] labor,” prosecutors said.
The survivor’s husband, Salman Chaudhri, was not dtsying regularly in the family’s home, and had moved to Pennsylvania for his medical education and then to California to set up his practice. He got engaged to another woman in 2013. The survivor revealed that the husband did not take her, or their four children with him to California.
Prosecuters also revealed that the family also tried to separate the survivor from her children. They revealed that the children were encouraged to spit on their mother, and had been convinced that she was dangerous. The children were also belittled and punished if they would ever show any kindness to their mother.
In May 2016, the survivor managed to escape with her brother from Pakistan and had filed a police case with Chesterfield County Police detective Laura Kay, after which the family members were placed under arrest.
“After two months of rebuilding her relationships with her family and gaining emotional courage, [the victim] contacted [her brother], who helped her leave the home,” prosecutors wrote. The survivor “subsequently gained full custody of her children, despite a contested custody battle with the defendants.”
