![]() Her story actually began twenty years earlier in the gilded presidential halls of MalacaƱang Palace. Sarah Balabagan's harrowing experience encapsulated the plight facing many overseas domestic laborers from the Philippines. 4 She returned to her family and a hero's welcome in the Philippines in 1996. 3 Responding to public pressure and mass political mobilizations, the Philippine government had Balabagan's sentence commuted to one hundred cane lashes, "blood money" restitution, and one year in an Emerati prison. When she was sentenced to death by firing squad, Filipinos sought political accountability from their government and implored it to intervene on behalf of Balabagan. Contracted to work as a maid, she boarded a plane bound to Dubai hoping to send remittances home: as she later stated in an interview, "I wanted to help lift my family out of poverty." 2 Following the execution of another overseas Filipina domestic worker, Flor Contemplacion, in Singapore earlier that year, Balabagan's legal trials in 1995 galvanized the Philippines. Only two months earlier, Balabagan had left her home in Mindanao as a minor with illegal documents falsifying her age. Having endured his relentless sexual harassment, she protected herself against attempted rape by stabbing him to death. ![]() On July 19 th, 1994, Sarah Balabagan, a fourteen-year-old overseas Filipina domestic worker in the United Arab Emirates, killed her employer, a sixty-seven-year-old widower, in self-defense. The quietest, most docile worker could, behind her apron or her uniform, be sharpening a blade. ![]()
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