Ismira Lutfia, Jakarta – The task of helping migrant workers who suffered abuse at the hands of their employers does not end after they've been brought back home, women's rights activists said on Wednesday, as they called on the government to provide better support for these victims.

"The government and society in general should be more friendly and helpful when it comes to repatriated domestic workers who encountered violence or sexual abuse and return with unwanted children," the head of the National Commission on Violence Against Women, Yuniyanti Chuzaifah, said in a panel discussion on migrant workers organized by the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club.

Maids, she said, sometimes return with unwanted children as a result of being raped by their male employers.

Various shocking cases of migrant worker abuse continue to fill news pages, creating outrage in a country that has at least 4.3 million citizens working abroad who last year remitted $6.6 billion.

At least 1.2 million of them are working in neighboring Malaysia, where several cases of abuse last year led the government to impose a ban on sending migrant workers.

In one of the most recent cases, a Malaysian couple was arrested for burning their Indonesian maid with a hot iron and scalding water, with the husband also accused of raping the woman repeatedly.

Another 1.2 million Indonesian workers are estimated to be in Saudi Arabia, where worker Sumiati was tortured for three months. Sumiati's case was so horrifying that Women's Empowerment Minister Linda Gumelar herself flew to Saudi Arabia to look into the case.

Yuniyanti also called on the government to hold accountable the receiving countries where the domestic workers encountered the abuse by involving them in the maids' recovery. But she and other activists emphasized that protection and preventing these cases from happening should still be the priority.

"The current regulations on migrant workers are not protection-oriented but business-oriented," Choirul Hadi, the secretary general of the Indonesian Migrant Workers' Union (SBMI), said at the same discussion.

He said recruitment agencies only talk to job seekers about the good financial prospects of domestic workers abroad and put aside information on their rights or what actions they should take in case they have problems in their workplace.

Yuniyanti said lengthy and costly procedures for getting documents and completing the recruitment process in the job seekers' respective regions often lead them to deal directly with recruitment agencies in big cities.

Some agencies use or accept fake documents just to be able to send someone abroad. SCTV reported that Sumiati, who comes from Dompu in West Nusa Tenggara, was listed as a 23-years-old by the agency that sent her to the Middle East, while she was actually 18 years old at the time (three years below the required age).

The information came from Dompu Police, who examined Sumiati's elementary and senior high school certificates.