Sumarti Ningsih and Seneng Mujiasih travelled for work and opportunity. Instead they were trapped in a system some call modern-day slavery

Like millions of Indonesian women, Sumarti Ningsih travelled thousands of miles from her village in the hopes of providing much-needed extra income for her family back home.



What set her apart was not the long hours or back-breaking work as a maid she endured in a system some say amounts to modern-day slavery, but her grisly torture, rape and murder – along with another woman, Seneng Mujiasih – at the hands of Rurik Jutting, a Cambridge-educated British banker.

Rurik Jutting guilty of murder of two Indonesian women in Hong Kong Read more

Now, two years after the killings, a jury has unanimously found Jutting guilty of the murders of both women.

Both women first came to Hong Kong as domestic helpers. For Ningsih’s family, in Cilacap, Central Java, having a daughter working in a far-off city never to return was all too familiar. In 2008, her older sister went to work as a domestic helper in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta. Shortly after she arrived, she disappeared and has never been seen since.

That was the same year Ningsih married at 17. Her son was born less than a year later after her husband left just before the baby’s birth. She would be dead at 23.

For her family at home, supporting six people on just $70 (£56) a month from rice farming became increasingly difficult, and by the time Ningsih was murdered she was sending her family nearly four times that amount.

Although she called her family every day, her son was too young to sit for long conversations and barely knew the woman on the other end of the phone. He was only five years old when she was killed.

“Her son never really knew what it meant to have a mother,” Suyitno, Ningsih’s older brother, tells the Guardian. “He knows this woman is dead, that she was murdered, but doesn’t fully understand who she is in relation to him.”

Roughly half of Hong Kong’s 340,000 live-in maids are from Indonesia, surviving on just HK$4,000 (£415) a month.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Indonesian migrant workers pray during a vigil in Hong Kong in 2014 for the two murder victims. Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

Desperate situations are common among migrants in the city. The agencies that bring the women from Indonesia and the Philippines levy high fees, often in the form of debt, and their entire lives are dictated by their employer. Their lives are worlds away from the expat bankers and even the Hong Kong families that hire them.

Both Ningsih and Mujiasih worked as maids before losing their jobs. Finding new work often means months of waiting, a new round of agency fees and a requirement they first leave Hong Kong.

“Anyone can fall into the situation of these two women if they are desperate enough, but no one comes willingly to do sex work,” says Eni Lestari, chair of the International Migrants Alliance. “We are confined to a certain box where we can only do a few jobs.”

The laws governing domestic workers, Lestari adds, mean: “Hong Kong is a place where modern-day slavery is actually promoted.”

Once the two women lost their jobs, finding new work was necessary to survive. Ningsih first went back to Indonesia, studying to become a DJ, before returning to Hong Kong to work as a waitress, her family says.

Mujiasih, also known as Jesse Lorena, from Muna, in Indonesia’s southeast Sulawesi province, overstayed her visa and worked odd jobs. Her gradual slide into occasional sex work happened over a period of months, friends say.

“Everyone thinks her life was sex, drugs and rock and roll, and it’s not like that, it’s really not,” says Rob Van Den Bosch, a friend of Mujiasih’s and entertainment manager at the Queen Victoria pub.

“It became a tool for survival and also a mindset in her head: ‘If I do this, I can really have a future – I can leave Hong Kong and have all the money I need.’”

Van Den Bosch met Mujiasih through an ex-girlfriend and saw her almost every Sunday for about three years.

“She was a strong, nice, gentle and friendly woman,” he says. “She was really alive, but that is all gone now.”

Despite the killings, which grabbed headlines around the world, there is little sign anything has changed in the area.

The Wan Chai neighbourhood where Jutting met the two women is a collection of contradictions. Part red-light district, part moneyed playground, so-called girlie bars line the notorious Lockhart Road, while down the street rich workers sip expensive cocktails, all a stone’s throw away from traditional wonton noodle shops.

Mama-sans sit on stools above miniature shrines built into the façade of nearly every girlie bar, filling the air with the smell of burning incense.

At the New Makati pub and disco, the last place Mujiasih was seen alive, Yadi, 28, explains a typical night.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the Asian Migrants Coordinating Body (AMCB) protest outside the high court in Hong Kong during the trial of Rurik Jutting. Photograph: Lam Yik Fei/Getty Images

“I start here, then have two other bars I go to, and I have many boyfriends at each one,” she says, as sped-up renditions of year-old pop music blare in the background. “Hong Kong is exhausting, but working here is the only way I can ever afford to build a house and live a better life.”

She is originally from a village outside the Indonesian port city of Surabaya, and came to Hong Kong this time on an “entertainment visa”. She belts out a few lines of Adele’s Someone Like You; the only point in the entire evening Yadi looks truly happy is when she sings.

But she admits there are few opportunities for her to perform, and that those are mainly to fulfill the conditions of her visa. She complains that wages for domestic helpers were too low, and not enough to support her parents, two young sisters as well as her brother’s young family.



“I’m planning to go back home next year. I’ll have enough money by then,” she says, a common refrain among the women working in Wan Chai.

As Yadi heads to the next bar, she passes a currency exchange window on the corner lit up like a capitalist Christmas tree, where a stream of older white men hand over notes from around the world, quickly changed into Hong Kong dollars to be spent at nearby bars.

Just around the corner a Western Union branch prominently displays exchange rates for Filipino and Indonesian currencies, transmitting the wages earned down the street to families back home.



Jutting’s apartment was just a five-minute walk from this road, in one of the area’s most expensive addresses. He has spent the past two years in prison on the edge of the city.



Forced labour common among Hong Kong's domestic helpers, study finds Read more

Ningsih’s family hasn’t followed the news of the trial closely – they say it’s too painful – but they want to know the verdict and sentence in the murder case. Jutting was not separately charged with rape or torture, and the family is also mulling filing a civil suit against him.

“We want to sue, but even if we are given US$100,000, any amount won’t be enough for Jutting to pay for what he did and it will never bring Sumarti back to us,” her brother Suyitno says.

He wants to leave the village to earn a better salary in a nearby city, but his parents fear losing a third child to an unfamiliar place.

Villagers in Ningsih’s hometown have watched the case with a sense of worry that the Hong Kong court would fail to deliver the justice they seek.

“Everyone here was very shocked and angry and they all hate Rurik,” Suyitno said. “Some were so angry they said: ‘Bring this man to our village, we will kill him together.’”