In a Day's Work Read online

  Of the thirty jobs she has had over the course of six years, she says she has experienced sexual harassment in nearly a half dozen of them. All of the incidents were mortifying and upsetting, but some were especially traumatizing. There was the husband of a client who made sexual innuendos and who came into her room at night to grope her in the dark. There was the eighty-year-old man she cared for who constantly talked about sex, grabbed at her, and invited her into his bed when he was naked. There was the son of a client who wanted to talk to her about dildos.

  Out of embarrassment, Baldonado didn’t do or say anything when these things had happened. Nowadays, she recognizes the irony: “I was a human rights activist in the Philippines, and I don’t know why I was putting up with this,” she says.

  In 2011, domestic work and activism began to merge for Baldonado. Mechthild Hart, a co-founder of a workforce training and support organization called the Chicago Coalition of Household Workers, got in touch with her. Hart wanted to know if Baldonado would be willing to volunteer with Latino Union, a Chicago-based organization dedicated to improving the working conditions of immigrant workers and day laborers. The organization needed help recruiting Asian domestic workers for a survey that was being conducted by the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Baldonado agreed and took on the task with her usual aplomb. Hart could see that Baldonado had a knack for finding and reaching other domestic workers, and after she nominated Baldonado to speak about her experiences in domestic work at a town hall in Washington, D.C., the caregiver transitioned into a job as an organizer for Latino Union. In her new role, the problem of sexual harassment in the industry continued to trouble her.

  She has a distinct memory of a Latina domestic worker who came to her and said that she had been forced to have sex with the husband of a client. The worker wanted to make a report to the police, but she was undocumented and felt stuck in her job. She was one of the few who had come to discuss on-the-job sexual violence directly with Baldonado, even though the organizer knew that there were others.

  The depth of the silence was obvious to Baldonado; in a support group that she helped run for victims of violence, women always showed up, but very few wanted to speak. “Sometimes they would sit and just cry and say, ‘Next time I’ll be able to talk,’” Baldonado says. “It’s so shameful. The shame is there. You see so many immigrants who are so ashamed to tell their stories.”

  In 2015, Baldonado moved to Los Angeles to work for the Pilipino Workers Center, one of the organizations that helped pass the California Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. She has found that even with a change in job, demographics, and location, the workers she organizes remain uneasy about discussing sexual harassment on the job.

  “It’s the shame,” she concludes.

  Baldonado knows firsthand how social, cultural, and religious expectations can make it hard to talk about the problem, and she has felt how damaging it is to be judged for it. In 2012, Latino Union hosted an event to honor a Chicago exhibit recognizing domestic workers on International Human Rights Day, and Baldonado had been tapped to introduce Ai-jen Poo, the Domestic Workers United organizer who was now the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. During her remarks, Baldonado shared her experiences of sexual harassment and assault as a domestic worker.

  Afterward, one of Baldonado’s friends, another Filipina, privately chastised her for failing to be more modest in public. “Why would you say that?” her friend had demanded. Baldonado still remembers her response with clarity: “I said: Who will say it if I don’t?”

  The domestic worker–turned–organizer says she has been made bold by her experiences in the Philippines, where she had been an antidictatorship activist. In 1983, she was arrested and tried after the government accused her of being a subversive. She remembers what it was like to be scrutinized in court, how indignant she felt about being on display and having her experiences questioned and doubted. Her trial dragged on for two years, and she remained in detention the entire time. “There was a suspension of rights,” says Baldonado. “They also made up charges like weapons possession so I couldn’t get bail.”

  As a political detainee, she was moved from detention centers to “safe houses” so that no one, not even her family, knew where she was. She was chained to the bedpost of a guard’s bed and forced to sleep on a blanket on the floor. Her captors tried to make her divulge the identities of other activists through weeks of water torture. She is proud that she never gave up a single name.

  After two years, a judge found in her favor and he released her in 1985.

  Baldonado says her courtroom experience in the Philippines is what made it possible for her to speak about sexual violence in the United States: She had already overcome the devastating experience of being publicly judged.

  Even so, it remains difficult for Baldonado to confront the issue. In 2016, a few months before the Illinois Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights became law, she went back to Chicago for an event sponsored by Healing to Action, an organization that works to combat workplace sexual violence.

  The audience heard from a panel of women who had been sexually harassed and assaulted while working in a hotel, a casino, a restaurant, and a factory. Baldonado was the lunchtime keynote speaker. For weeks, she had fretted about what to say. She felt especially anxious because she knew there would be other Filipinas in the audience, including her sister, whom she had never talked to about the sexual harassment and assault she had experienced. Baldonado worried that by speaking about sexual violence, she would bring shame to her community and her family and that it would turn them away from the issue altogether.

  Baldonado decided to make her uncertainty part of the speech. “Of all of the abuses in the domestic worker workplace, sexual violence is the one that is less talked about,” she said. “Why so? Because there is shame, fear of losing a job, retaliation, fear of deportation, language barriers, and ignorance of workplace laws that make us silent.”

  She said that she was going to tell the audience about the sexual harassment that she experienced as a caregiver. But first, she offered a preface. “Honestly, before I decided to give more details of the sexual harassment I encountered, I consulted my friend and mentor Mechthild Hart about the possible embarrassment that you and I might get from this experience,” she said. “And she said, ‘Okay, just get over it!’”

  The crowd erupted in laughter but became quiet again as Baldonado continued recounting the advice she had received from Hart, who had added, “If we don’t get over it, then it means you are still accepting the blame for what happened to you.”

  With that, Baldonado began to share examples of the sexual harassment she had experienced as a domestic worker. She closed by telling the audience that she was speaking that day to counter the stigma and shame that society puts on sexual violence victims like herself.

  She was there that day, she said, with the intention of being vocal and defiant.

  4

  When Only the Police and the Prosecutor Believe You

  To Guadalupe Chávez, the roads that snaked around the endless acres of farmland in California’s Lost Hills had begun to take on a cruel similarity. Almond orchards gave way to yet more almond orchards, which bled into unending stands of pistachio trees, their branches a blur of leafy green as she drove.

  A recently widowed mother of two from Mexico with no immigration papers and little English, Chávez supported her family with farm work. But she didn’t know these orchards. In the red pickup truck ahead of her was the man who stood between her and an overdue paycheck. He was a supervisor with a local farm labor contractor. When they’d met near the farm, he’d told her the missing check was with his brother, and they needed to find him. Follow me, he’d said.

  She thought of her unpaid bills and her two young sons. She started the car. He led her down one road, then another. They started and stopped, first at an aqueduct, then at a couple places near the side of the road, and then a shed. As they drove, they talke
d on the phone, and he asked her questions about where she lived, whether she liked to go dancing.

  After she arrived at each location, he would tell her that they still weren’t in the right place and they needed to keep driving. Chávez found the whole thing strange, but she thought that they were looking for the man with her check. So she continued in a mix of apprehension and determination. She needed that check.

  Suddenly the supervisor drove straight into the orchards themselves. She followed into a muddy grove, now blinded by the symmetry of the trees. This is when she began to feel scared. The supervisor got out of his truck and walked to her driver’s side window. There’s nobody here, he told her. Chávez asked about her check.

  I have your check, he said. If you give me your underwear.1

  What? Chávez said.

  If you give me your underwear, he replied. Or do you want me to take them off of you?

  She protested but he insisted: Do it fast or I’m gonna do it for you.

  He added, You could scream, but it wouldn’t make a difference because nobody can hear you way out here.

  Chávez couldn’t think straight. Did he have a gun? Would he get violent? She didn’t know the way out.

  She hiked up the ankle-length skirt she was wearing, pulled off the shorts she had on underneath, and took off her underwear. He told her to open up her legs. Then, Chávez says, the man raped her with his fingers.

  Afterward, panicked, she asked him where they were so that she could leave and go home.

  He told her to follow him out of the orchard. Before they drove off, he handed her the $250 paycheck she had earned for a week of picking pomegranates. He got in the truck and drove ahead. But before they were out of the trees, he stopped and approached Chávez’s car again, this time with his pants undone. “Do you like to suck it?” he asked her.

  She didn’t know what he would do if she refused, so she said yes. He ejaculated on her sweatshirt and the side of her face. When he was done, he pointed straight ahead. The main road was there, not far. He told her not to say anything about what had happened. And he handed her underwear back to her.

  Crying, she cleaned herself up with a tissue and then drove home too fast. She tried to remind herself that there was nothing else she could have done. She didn’t know these roads. She had been afraid that he might kill her. She had thought it would just be easier to say yes to whatever he was asking.

  She still blamed herself for the whole thing. As she drove, she wondered if God would forgive her. She searched for the logic in what happened. “It was my check,” she says. “It was my money. I worked for it. Why did I have to do that to get my check? Why did I have to do that?”

  Chávez eventually did something that rarely happens among people who say they’ve been sexually assaulted. She talked to the police. The vast majority of sexual assaults and rapes—about two-thirds, according to the federal government—are never reported to law enforcement. It’s not hard to understand why.

  Many women blame themselves for what happened because they think that they could have done something to stop it.2 It’s a rationale that doesn’t apply to other violent crimes, such as armed robberies or attempted murders. Nevertheless, self-blame is one of the most cited reasons that women don’t report sexual violence, along with embarrassment, fear of not being believed, and a distrust of the criminal justice system.3

  Beyond the basic impulses to keep things a secret out of shame and fear, victims may be afraid or skeptical of the criminal justice system. “Victims of sexual violence can have a rough time in the criminal justice system and it scares them off,” says David Lisak, a clinical psychologist who studies the causes and consequences of violence. “They have heard and seen victims who do come forward, who become the targets, basically, of pretty intense negative mischaracterizations.”

  There’s evidence to ground these concerns. A 2016 U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the operations of the Baltimore Police Department found it to be dismissive of sexual assault victims. According to the report, “Detectives fail to develop and resolve preliminary investigations; fail to identify and collect evidence to corroborate victims’ accounts; inadequately document their investigative steps; fail to collect and assess data, and report and classify reports of sexual assault; and lack supervisory review.”4

  Even police departments that aggressively investigate sexual assault cases and treat victims with sensitivity face a universal challenge: A delay in reporting makes it harder to collect evidence. For some victims, it can take weeks or even years to feel ready to report a sexual assault to the police.

  Alice Vachss, a former New York City prosecutor who has personally tried more than a hundred sexual assault cases and supervised hundreds more, recalls one case in which the defense attorney asked a sexual assault victim why she had taken so long to report the crime. “And she said, ‘I wasn’t sure I wanted to be here,’” Vachss recalls, “and the defense attorney said, ‘What do you mean?’ And she said, ‘I wasn’t sure I wanted to be sitting in this chair answering your questions.’

  “This is how people feel about it—that it’s painful,” says Vachss, author of Sex Crimes: Then and Now. “The amazing thing to me is that so many victims are willing to prosecute for nothing more than that little piece of justice that they might get at the end.”

  Immigrants in particular, face formidable barriers to reporting the crimes to law enforcement.5 A 2007 study found that they are less likely to report crimes or contact the police for help compared to native-born Americans.6 Studies have found that the fear of deportation influences Latinas in particular in their willingness to seek police assistance.7 A federally funded study published in 2010 that examined the tendency of Latinas to report sexual assault to the police found that only one in fifteen sexually assaulted Latinas did so—fewer than the general population as a whole.8 The less familiar the women in the study were with American laws and culture, the less likely they were to come forward. Some of the reasons they cited for not asking the police for help were related directly to their immigration status, including language barriers and fear of deportation.9

  Sexual assault at work is shielded by yet another barrier to reporting the crime: fear of losing the job.10 When work opportunities are scarce and financial pressures are unyielding, the calculation becomes unfathomable.

  In 2005, Erika Morales was faced with this very quandary. She cleaned banks on the night shift as a janitor in California’s Central Valley for ABM Industries (formerly American Building Maintenance), one of the largest such companies in the country. The only person she came into regular contact with was her supervisor, José Vásquez, a broad-shouldered man with salt-and-pepper hair. Unbeknownst to her and ABM, Vásquez was a convicted sex offender, and the company had already received complaints that the supervisor had sexually harassed women workers.

  Vásquez began to give Morales a strange feeling when he started to appear, like a ghost, at her worksite to watch her as she vacuumed or scrubbed bathrooms. In addition to staring at her and making sexual comments, she says the supervisor sneaked up behind her and grabbed and groped her.11

  She was disgusted and ashamed of the abuse, but she stayed on the job for a while longer. She wanted to quit, but as a single mother with two children, she couldn’t figure out how she’d be able to go without a paycheck until she found a new job. “In that moment, I was going through a situation where I couldn’t stop working,” she says. “In that moment, the father of my children wasn’t there. I was alone with the kids and I didn’t have any other source of income for myself or my two kids. So I had to hope that it would change.”

  She figured it would take weeks of filling out applications before she could land a new job and didn’t know how she would feed her children in the meantime. “That was one of the important reasons why I didn’t leave the job,” she says.

  She tried to appeal directly to Vásquez instead. “I would say, ‘Please don’t keep doing this to me. I need the job.
I truly need it. I need my kids to eat. I need to pay my rent, pay my bills. Please, I don’t want to go through this,’” Morales says.

  Vásquez only laughed. “People always say, ‘Say no and they will stop,’” Morales says. “I would say it and he still wouldn’t stop.”

  The janitor finally turned in her keys and quit after she says Vásquez attacked her in a supply closet one fall evening. “That’s when I said, ‘No more. I can’t stand this,’” she says.

  Morales is now a popular Spanish-language media personality in California’s Central Valley, and she has counseled her audience not to stand for sexual harassment at work. “It’s your work and it’s not fair,” Morales says. “It’s not fair for women or for anyone that this happens to, that someone could take advantage of their power in whatever job they’re in. I’m not only talking about janitors either. No, this happens everywhere.”

  Guadalupe Chávez says she also had the weight of providing for two children on her mind when the supervisor made his demands in the orchard. “When he wanted all of that, I felt more obligated,” Chávez says. “And I always thought about my children.”

  Not every victim will choose to report the crime or move forward with pressing charges, nor should they feel pressured to do so. But the dynamics of immigrant labor, which leave workers exploited but unprotected, mean that an unscrupulous supervisor with a paycheck can extract just about anything from his workers.

  Guadalupe Chávez grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico. She began working at her father’s fruit stand when she was about eight, as soon as she was old enough to count change. By her teens, she had set up her own stall selling limes and oranges. The memory of the lively bustle of the streets of her hometown still makes her nostalgic.

  Her family made the move to the United States in 1989 when their fruit business faltered. Chávez came to the country with her parents and four siblings, landing in rural California where most of her mother’s family had settled. Chávez remembers finding it so quiet and dull compared to her life in the city. She hoped that she would be able to go to high school, but her parents told her that they needed financial help. She took a job as a babysitter before finding more reliable work at the many farms in the area. Agricultural work suited Chávez, who discovered that she loved the open air and the physicality of working in the fields.