Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, a 23-year-old Indonesian maid, returned to her home province of Java from Hong Kong last month hardly able to walk. Cuts and burns covered most of her body. Her employer in Hong Kong allegedly beat her and locked her up for weeks.

Each year hundreds of thousands of young Indonesian women like Ms. Erwiana fan out across Asia and the Middle East to live in the homes of local people and serve as their domestic helpers — cooking, cleaning and caring for children and the elderly. Most send a portion of their salary home to their families every month, fueling an Indonesian economy that relies on remittances. More than 320,000 foreign domestic helpers live in Hong Kong, a city of seven million people, and close to half of them come from Indonesia.

Although Hong Kong has better legal protections for foreign domestic helpers than other Asian countries like Singapore and Malaysia, the laws that govern their living and working conditions are discriminatory and foster an environment that can lead to abuse. Ms. Erwiana was by no means the first victim in Hong Kong of a horrible beating, and unless changes are made to the law, she won’t be the last.

The most restrictive requirement on foreign maids in Hong Kong is the so-called live-in law, which requires that the guest workers reside with their employers. Many employers give maids small windowless closets for bedrooms, and sometimes worse. The live-in rule means that maids are often on call 24 hours a day. And maids with abusive employers have few places to go or people they can turn to for help.