The Women We Send and Do Not Bring Back

The Women We Send and Do Not Bring Back

Bangladesh's migrant women, the Gulf, and the abuse the country has learned to live with

I was ten the first time I flew to Bangladesh. Returning to Dubai, our PIA flight broke its journey in Karachi for an eight-hour transit, and we were put up in a nearby hotel, the only Bangladeshi family on the flight.

Two women knocked on our door. Bangladeshis, travelling alone to Dubai on work visas, unsafe from men knocking on their own. My parents let them in. One was married, leaving an eight-month-old daughter and a husband behind. The other, younger, was promised a work visa through her sister. At dinner, men at other tables tried to talk to them, undeterred by a family sitting right there. Before we landed, they asked my mother for our number. She said no. She knew what a work visa to Dubai could mean for a woman alone, and didn't want us pulled in.

I never learned what happened to them. That not-knowing is the subject of this piece: Bangladesh sends hundreds of thousands of women like them abroad every year and has built almost no way of finding out what happens next.

Why they go

Most are not choosing between good options. Returnee research describes a recurring profile: widows, women abandoned by husbands, sole earners with no land and no other route to income. Rahima, a mother of two abandoned by her husband, took a broker's promise of an "office job" in Riyadh in 2020 as a lifeline and was delivered instead to a mansion for round-the-clock labor at a lower wage. Migration is also cheaper for women than men, part of why families send daughters and wives first.

Two decades, in numbers

Women have migrated from Bangladesh in real numbers only since the early 1990s; by 2013 they were about six percent of all migrants, a 1,600-percent rise since 1991. A 2015 deal with Saudi Arabia pushed annual female migration past 100,000 a year for most of the following decade. Between 2004 and 2025, more than 1.25 million Bangladeshi women migrated for work, roughly 95 percent of them to the Gulf. That number is now falling sharply, a 41-percent drop from 2022 to 2025, driven partly by fear: households that once sent a daughter abroad now send a son instead.

The abuse

BRAC's Migration Programme recorded at least 69,090 women returning home since 2019, many reporting physical, psychological, or sexual abuse; food deprivation; unpaid wages; and punishing hours. A wider count found more than 470,000 Bangladeshi workers returned over six years after abuse or exploitation, including at least 67,199 women who reported physical or sexual violence, a figure researchers say still understates the real toll, given how much goes unreported out of fear and shame.

Behind the totals are individual women: Rizia Begum of Moulvibazar, whose family lost contact and believed her dead until she turned up at the Dhaka airport mentally unstable; and a woman from Kurigram, raped and impregnated by her employer, who fled to the embassy in Riyadh.

Much of this is structural. Under the kafala system, a worker's residency is tied to her employer, who must consent to any job change or exit; leaving without consent can mean jail for "absconding." Domestic workers in Saudi Arabia have no maximum working hours, no guaranteed day off, and no inspectors allowed inside private homes.

Some do not survive it. The Wage Earners' Welfare Board recorded 799 bodies of female migrant workers returned over eight years, most death certificates listing "suicide," a classification whose thoroughness, after months of alleged rape and starvation, is impossible to verify from outside.

Women filed 2,036 complaints with BMET between 2021 and 2025; most were marked "resolved," but of 110 agencies accused of wrongdoing in one year, only 14 paid compensation. In fiscal 2024–25, just 395 workers received legal aid abroad, and only 11 were women. Bangladesh, however, runs only four overseas safe homes for a female workforce in the hundreds of thousands.

Coming home to nothing

Returnees confront stigma, financial insecurity, and trauma, with patriarchal structures often blaming the women themselves. Sexual violence carries the harshest stigma: BRAC staff routinely meet women rejected by their own families, some living permanently in shelters because a husband won't take them back. "I was treated badly, as if I were a bad woman," one returnee, Dalia, told The Business Standard, "even my family members acted as though I had done something wrong."

What Bangladesh has and hasn't done

On paper, Bangladesh has real policy, an Overseas Employment and Migrants Act, a Domestic Workers' Protection Policy, and a statutory Welfare Board. In practice, the gap shows in every number above: four safe homes, eleven women given legal aid, and only fourteen agencies sanctioned out of 110 accused. A former foreign minister, asked in 2021 about one case, admitted that with millions of women in Saudi Arabia, it was "not possible for me to keep tabs on every one of them." Neither Bangladesh nor Saudi Arabia has ratified ILO Convention 189, the standard built to protect domestic workers.

The women I never saw again

I think about those two women from the Karachi transit more than the length of that one evening should justify. What I remember most is not the fear in the hotel room but the dinner afterward. How ordinary the violation looked from the outside. Men at other tables were treating two unaccompanied Bangladeshi women as available simply because they were alone and traveling. My mother's refusal to give out our number wasn't paranoia; it was pattern recognition, built from a shared, unspoken knowledge that every Bangladeshi family of a certain generation seems to carry about what "going to Dubai on a work visa" can actually mean for a woman with no other options.

I don't know if either of them made it home safely, whether they came back with money and their health intact, or whether they became one more line in BRAC's yearly count or one more body flown back with "suicide" written on a form nobody double-checked. That is, in the end, the most honest thing this piece can say: Bangladesh has built an entire migration economy on women like them, and it still cannot tell you, with any confidence, what happens to most of them once they're gone.

Sources: The Daily Star, Dhaka Tribune, The Business Standard, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, BRAC, BMET, the Wage Earners' Welfare Board, IOM, ILO, and peer-reviewed migration research, current as of mid-2026.