Therapeutic Sociality: Empathy and care amongst distressed Ethiopian domestic workers

Abstract

Ethiopian migrant domestic workers frequently experience violence and abuse during employment, which can lead to serious emotional and mental distress. After returning to Ethiopia, some distressed women receive care at residential facilities specifically dedicated to rehabilitating returned domestic workers. In this paper, I examine the narratives from previously distressed domestic workers living in one such facility to understand how they view and respond to the distress of newly arrived returnees. I suggest that through embodied knowing they position the returnees’ distress as familiar, and, importantly, as ambiguous and temporary. It is at this intersection of ambiguous-familiarity where I situate an ethics of care marked by an empathic understanding of having-been-there and what-will-be, a past and future oriented knowledge that precipitates caring responses marked by calm, gentle, and ordinary engagements—a therapeutic sociality. I demonstrate that while empathy may be central to other therapeutic communities across various histories and geographies, it is a foregrounding of embodied knowledge and the imaginative projection of what-will-be amongst previously distressed returned Ethiopian migrant domestic workers that is distinctive to their ethics of care, and may offer both a practical and ethical resource for rehabilitating returned domestic workers.