Sri Lankan women who take up domestic work in the Middle East to support families devastated by conflict are being targeted by recruitment agents who order them to take contraceptives before leaving.

Six recruiters licensed by the Sri Lankan government said they could provide an employer with a “three-month guarantee” that a maid would not become pregnant. 

An agent from Gulf Jobs in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, said: “Before we can send a maid, there is a medical check-up by the government and no one can influence that. But once the medical test is done … there is a device we can give in them. If you want it, we can arrange it.”

While no women were prepared to speak openly about being forced to take contraceptives, the Guardian found that many recruitment agencies make migrant workers take Depo-Provera, an injectable contraceptive that lasts for three months.

Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of husbands, fathers and brothers, and took a severe physical or mental toll on countless other combatants, has left many Tamil women as the sole breadwinners for their families.

Rahini Bhaskaran, coordinator of Migrants Network, a migrant rights organisation, said women were so desperate for work that they complied unquestioningly with the stipulations of recruiters.

“Most women don’t know what the injections are for,” she said. “They are not told anything about it,” she said.

Bhaskaran believes the contraceptive serves a double purpose: covering up potential sexual assaults by recruitment agents and serving as a guarantee to prospective employers in the Gulf that workers will not get pregnant.

*Read the rest of the full story originally published on TheGuardian.com here.*