Who Cares for the Caged Bird?
Introduction
Beyond the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) skyscrapers and gold, its fast cars and shimmer, its oil barrels and pearls, are its central jails. This is where thousands of migrants, men and women of all stature, continue to languish for “crimes” ranging from bounced checks to drug peddling. Central jails do not feature in our collective imagination of the UAE, and so, neither do the carers of loved ones who have been criminalised. Their care work emerges in many forms: running from court to lawyer’s office and back again, navigating a tongue not their own, waiting endlessly for a phone call that may never come… All to be unworthy of “counting,” of value—and like their family members, forced into invisibility.
Here, we offer a reflection of what "counts" as work in the context of South Asian migrant women whose families are incarcerated in the region. Through conversations with a group of caregivers and thematic analysis, we attempt to answer: What is work? What is (in)visible? And why? We explore the degrees of freedom in a carceral world, peering into the lives of women who give up dreams and opportunities—women who shrink—because of a system that grinds people to dust. We unfold the binary of freedom—free and unfree—and ask whether freedom can be a spectrum.
Together, we invite you to explore the nuances of what is considered work, especially that which is done by women at the margins. We hope you can peer into the lives of women who are camouflaged in public imagination—the caregivers of those incarcerated—with empathy. The prison and its machinations can no longer serve as a mecca of justice; collectively, may we imagine a future untethered.
The UAE comprises the Emirates, or cities, of Dubai, Sharjah, Al Ain, Ajman, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Umm Al Quwain, and its capital Abu Dhabi. It is a federation of monarchies widely known for its authoritarian regime (Freedom House, 2023). It joined the United Nations in 1971 after it gained independence from the British.
Major world powers—states and institutions alike—acknowledged its economic prowess in the early 2000s, following its establishment as a thriving neoliberal, urban paradise owing to its geostrategic location in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region; heavy investments in tourism; oil exports; and real estate opportunities (Krane, 2009). However, the country was at the time mired by allegations of human rights abuses. It was, after all, slow to the frontier of human rights: slavery for example was only officially banned as an institution in the then-Trucial States in 1963 (Krane, 2009, p. 51). News of the nation's arbitrary bans, exploitation of low-wage migrant construction workers, lack of freedom of speech, and weak redressal mechanisms for migrant domestic workers experiencing abuse took center stage (Human Rights Watch, 2006).
Maybe things have changed since then. After all, the UAE just hosted COP28 (albeit amongst much criticism), and ranked 26th out of 180 countries in terms of corruption perception, the highest of all Arab states. Ahmed Naser al-Raisi, the country's Major General of the Interior Ministry, even serves as the President of Interpol (Human Rights Watch, 2021). Indeed, the young nation has swiftly managed to establish itself as a new beacon for human rights.
Regardless of the UAE's relationship with human rights, faithful or not, thousands of migrants—Indians in particular—continue to flock to the UAE. Migrants comprise 88.1 percent of the country's population and approximately 95 percent of its workforce (CIA, 2024), and receive no public benefits. South Asians form the majority of this migrant population, alongside smaller groups of migrants from neighbouring MENA countries and expatriates from the West (CIA, 2024). As per the most recent statistics, women form approximately 25 percent of the country's international migrant population (Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2013). Many of those who migrate from South Asia have been subject to the ills of the kafala system (Akıncı, 2022, p. 981), a legal framework wherein a migrant must secure a visa from a local sponsor to enter the UAE. Emirati sponsors have been criticised for confiscating passports and forcing migrant workers into exploitative work and bonded labor under the kafala system (Walk Free, n.d.).
About the UAE
A video from the official UAE Government archives. This clip has no audio. (n.d.)
It is of no surprise, then, to learn that a large proportion of the prison population in the UAE comprises South Asians with little access to rights and rights claimsmaking. As of data from 2014, approximately 9,826 people were imprisoned in the country, though they are far removed from the imagination of the UAE. “It is not one or two people,” one caregiver revealed to us. “Thousands and thousands of people are inside, you know?” Despite the significant number of their population, those incarcerated live on the margins of our awareness. Their caregivers are granted even fewer crumbs of space.
All cases in the UAE travel through a First Court, a Second Court (also known as an Appeals Court), and a Supreme Court. While the former two are specific to the Emirate—or city—a case is registered in, the Supreme Court makes decisions at the national level. Another caregiver shared, referring to the judgements she had to navigate regarding her husband’s cases, “[The] First Court is just random… I don’t know… But in the Appeals Court, they do read [your cases].”
Crime as we commonly understand it is considered to be relatively low in the UAE, but the country’s porous borders have made it a hotspot for human trafficking and sexual exploitation, money laundering, and drug peddling. The state does not have a public, open access database of statistics related to who it incarcerates and why.
Incarceration in the UAE
What we do know, nonetheless, is that 88.3 percent of those who remain incarcerated in the UAE are men. Many of them continue to languish in the country’s prisons for years, others are privileged to be supported by their wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters—women submerged into care in strange and unfamiliar conditions. Although the very first interventions to recognize care work originated from feminists, care and caregiving have entered our neo-liberal vocabularies and development agendas in an alarming fashion over the past few years. Liberal economists armed with results from “cutting edge” time use surveys have demanded a paid wage for care work from the state, and the United Nations has even celebrated its first ever International Day of Care. Care, as it appears, is the newest form of currency.
But the experience of caregiving for an incarcerated loved one especially under an authoritarian regime cannot be fully encapsulated in a survey or easily distilled into a policy framework. What cannot be neatly policed, lawyered, governed, calculated, tabulated, or recorded away must be stifled, is it not? And so, we forget about these women and their messy stories, their messy lives. We hide them between the folds of our newspapers or weave their fragments into our whispers. We push them to The Outside.
This is the nature of all of women’s lives, codified into the value they are able to serve men on warm platters. Women are taught that staying is survival, duty, and love—and maybe it is. Maybe in the face of a carceral institution that wants to break us down, women hold it all together. “Because we women are always strong, no?” One caregiver shared. “So we do not think we are doing anything more than we can. We are meant to do it also, because it is our family. I never thought that I am doing something very big. I am just doing it for my family… This is what my mother taught [from] my childhood [laughs].”
Today, millions of people across the world, radical feminists included, continue to believe that prison is the answer: it serves as punishment and reformation, while keeping the “bad guys” away from us “normal” people. With the criminals all stowed away in a tower we never have to see, we can feel safe, comfortable, protected. Do the women who love these criminals feel safe too?
Caregiving for the Incarcerated
A caregiver cooks her loved one's favourite meal once he is released.