'The ultimate example of modern slavery,' explained Urmila Bhoola, UN Special Rapporteur, interviewed by the BBC. In Kuwait, BBC journalists pretended to be a newly installed couple looking for a maid.
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It's easy: on a smartphone, via apps like Instagram, 4sale or Haraj, which are approved and available on Google Play and Apple's App Store, they found hundreds of ads, women 'for sale,' with even the possibility to negotiate the price with the seller by private messages.
Women classified by skin colour
Most of them come from African countries (Guinea, Ethiopia, Sudan...) or Asia (Philippines, Nepal, India...). The buyers choose according to a photo: the workers are classified by skin colour, with a clearly displayed price. With just a few clicks, you can buy a domestic worker for between £1000 and £2000.
Over a few days, the journalists contacted 57 people selling domestic servants, and visited a dozen of them. The vendors are very organised: 'Almost all of them advocated confiscating women's passports, locking them in the house, denying them any leave and giving them little or no access to a telephone,' the BBC reports.
And these illegal markets are not limited to Kuwait, laments BBC News Arabic, using Saudi Arabia as an example, where hundreds of women are reportedly sold via social networks.
Facebook, Google and Apple 'must be held responsible'
'What they are doing is promoting an online slave market,' said Urmila Bhoola, adding: 'If Google, Apple, Facebook or any other company hosts applications like these, they must be held accountable.'
She verbally denounces these companies that host these applications, believing that they must be held accountable. For example, on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, there are posts boosted by some hashtags, such as 'servants available for transfer,' 'servants for sale...'
The Kuwaiti authorities have also assured that they have summoned the account owners and asked them to withdraw their ads. They declared that they were 'at war with this type of behaviour.'
Contacted by the BBC, the Facebook group claimed to have banned one of the hashtags involved and Google and Apple announced that they were working with their developers 'to prevent illegal activities on their platforms.' However, both groups continue to offer in their catalog the 4Sale app, very popular in the context of this black market...
