Photographing young Englishwomen training to be nannies, Gratiane de Moustier couldn’t help laughing as she watched the students cradling and feeding dolls as if they were children with toys.

“All the girls were super-cute and nice, with nice uniforms,” she said in an interview. “It was kind of funny to hear those fake plastic babies crying. They were so serious taking care of those babies. The baby cries, the baby needs food, they walk around the city with those babies crying in the street.”

But when Ms. de Moustier encountered village girls training in Indonesia to be maids, she found herself closer to tears. “They don’t train in a nice mansion,” she said. “There’s no daylight. And I imagine those plastic dolls were bought 30 years ago. Fake baby, fake rice cooker. For some of them it was the first time seeing a washing machine or a microwave.”

In her first major photo project, Ms. de Moustier followed those Indonesian girls from their training camp on the island of Java to Hong Kong, where they join 300,000 maids cooking, washing, cleaning and caring for real babies. And too often — like maids in Malaysia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere — they encounter a singular form of domestic violence: the abuse of maids.

“They leave their homeland with high hopes and aspirations,” Ms. de Moustier said of the young Indonesians. “But more often than not, the reality at their destination turns their dreams in to nightmares.” Talking with them at their training camps, she said, “I kept getting the feeling that these girls are not prepared for this life.”

Gratiane de Moustier

Reports of abuse are a staple of journalistic coverage of foreign domestic helpers, with accounts like one from Singapore in 2007 of a family that was accused of extracting their maid’s front teeth, pouring hot wax on her head, hitting her with an iron rod, pouring hot water on her private parts and restraining her by tying her hands with a bathrobe.

The sadistic and sometimes bizarre abuses, often by the woman of the house, seem to show that the powerless maids offer an outlet for explosions of suppressed anger and frustration.

“I’m illustrating what I consider a modern version of slavery and human trafficking,” Ms. de Moustier wrote in an essay accompanying her still-unfinished project.

Ms. de Moustier came to photography in her mid-20s after earning a master’s degree in European and international business at the Sorbonne in Paris and working in a bank. She studied for a year at the International Center of Photography in 2006-7 and graduated from the London College of Communication in 2009 with a master’s degree in photojournalism and documentary photography.

She has been working for three and a half years, she said, as a freelance photographer, mostly for French publications. Like many young photographers today, she cut her teeth in Afghanistan and in Iran, where she said she produced essays on people her own age — “what it is to be 30 in Tehran” — and on what she calls “corrective rape.”

Gratiane de Moustier

“But it wasn’t me,” Ms. de Moustier said. “It was something I needed to do. But you know, what I love about this story and what I want to do for the rest of my life if I can, it’s long term, it’s investigation. I want to dedicate weeks of time to a single work, something that really fulfills me today, rather than doing news, where I don’t feel at ease visually or intellectually.”

Her work on maids has so far focused on Hong Kong, where foreign domestic workers are a visible presence and where Indonesians have in recent years surpassed Filipinos as the most numerous group. Some parts of town reflect this, with shops and groceries displaying Indonesian signs and selling Indonesian goods.

The next step in her project will be more difficult, documenting the lives of Indonesian maids in Malaysia, where abuses are some of the worst in the region and where it may be more complicated to gain access to the young women at work.

Then, Ms. de Moustier said, “the icing on the cake,” and perhaps the biggest challenge, would be to work in Saudi Arabia, possibly focusing on one maid and one family. Saudi Arabia is known as a harsh destination for maids, and the Philippines has placed restrictions on employment of its nationals there.

To round out the project, she said, she plans to follow a recruiter on his tour of Indonesian villages to portray the families and living situations of future domestic workers and to document the recruiting process, which she said sometimes includes payments of “pocket money” to parents in return for their daughters.

Finally, Ms. de Moustier wants to show their lives after they return home. “Some manage to start small businesses thanks to their income,” she wrote in her essay, “while others struggle for the rest of their lives.”

Gratiane de Moustier

Seth Mydans covered Southeast Asia for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune.

Ms. de Moustier’s “Dreamseekers” first came to our attention by way of fotovisura. Follow Lens on Twitter and Facebook.