Who Cares for the Caged Bird?
Tethering
Chapter 1
In the UAE, women represent only 31 percent of a population of nine million (UAE TDRA, 2022). Why is that, why does it matter, and what does any of this have to do with incarceration?
To answer the first question, we must understand how migrant women, who form the majority of the country’s women population, arrive in the country. Many migrate for work on visas sponsored by their employers, most of whom are men. Every year, thousands of domestic workers, nurses, and entry-level business employees take on the role of breadwinner, leaving their families behind in India. Another portion of women are sponsored by their husbands or fathers. Very few women sponsor their own visas or those of others (Dickinson, 2016). Most women are thus dependent on their sponsors to maintain their legal status in the country; the moment their visas expire or are cancelled, they must exit immediately to avoid hefty fines, imprisonment, or deportation without reentry.
Furthermore, instruments of the law such as government officials and police may believe them complicit in their family member’s actions without the burden of proof. This means caregivers face increasing scrutiny and surveillance. For instance, one caregiver was identified by facial recognition technology in one of Dubai’s infamous malls and taken to jail for her proximity to her husband’s infractions with the law—even after his death. Her husband, who had been incarcerated prior to his passing, left behind over a dozen unresolved cases in addition to severe grief. Presently unable to leave the country until she concludes his cases, an Emirati sponsors her visa through a shell company. Every year, she spends 16,000 Dirhams (the UAE's local currency; this is just over three and a half lakhs in Indian Rupees) to keep her late husband’s business breathing on paper.
This answers our second question. Why does this matter? We believe that no one should have power over the freedom of another. However, women find themselves legally bound to the men in their lives, tethered by the invisible barbwire of borders and their fabricated rules. In the UAE, men–family members and employers alike–can at once decide to forcibly displace the women they sponsor, uprooting their lives as they know it. They thus mirror the state, which has its own changing moods and temperament. In the time we spent speaking with caregivers alone, the UAE government had changed their visa laws three times over, determining how many weeks we could remain in the country as visitors.
Now, how is all this connected to the women who care for men who find themselves incarcerated? If a woman’s visa is sponsored by her family member, her legal status gains a degree of precarity. A woman caring for her incarcerated family member faces the bureaucratic burden of renewing his visa in addition to her own, only if possible for her specific case under UAE law, through prison walls. One caregiver who left her job to work on her brother’s case full-time, for example, had to then compel her husband to sponsor her once her employer canceled her work visa. She had to tether herself to a different post, but chose to be tethered nonetheless. This tethering is therefore gendered, just as our notions of caregiving are.
Women find themselves legally bound to the men in their lives, tethered by the invisible barbwire of borders and their fictitious rules.
Each woman, bound by love or duty, care or responsibility, was ushered into a cage of her own.
So… Why do caregivers stay? Across the world, imprisonment is an accurate predictor of divorce, for example, with each year of incarceration increasing a couple’s likelihood of divorce by 32 percent (Siennick, Stewart, and Staff, 2014). Prison severs our loving entanglements with one another, ruthlessly separating children from parents and siblings from their shared sky. It razes communities, atomising the family and straining lifelong bonds. Therefore, we understand that staying is indeed dissent, it is the difficult choice to fight on. The women we spoke with made that choice, even as each day presented new, more complex challenges and chameleon heartaches that disguised themselves into the background of their lives, always present if only obscured. Each woman, bound by love or duty, care or responsibility, was ushered into a cage of her own.
