Woman Gets 7 Years in Domestic Slavery Case

[MountainLaurel]

She'd been taken from her family in Nigeria as an adolescent and brought under false pretenses to the United States, where, according to evidence presented in federal court, she was raped by the man who claimed he was adopting her and abused by the man's wife.

Yesterday, the young woman, now 23, sat in the witness chair in federal court in Greenbelt, 10 feet from Adaobi Stella Udeozor, the woman who, prosecutors say, beat her and kept her in involuntary servitude. Calmly, the young woman said, "I want to make Stella pay the price for what she did to me."

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The judge told Udeozor that although she and other defendants charged in domestic slavery cases may come from cultures that allow the sort of behavior for which she was convicted, that was no excuse.

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But such mistreatment is common, according to law enforcement officials and advocacy groups who say thousands of women from impoverished countries are recruited every year to be live-in workers in the United States, only to be abused.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/18/AR2006041801520.html