The video of an Ethiopian domestic worker attempting suicide on Nov. 10 by jumping off the fourth floor of her building in Beirut shocked the country. It once again brought Lebanon’s much-criticized sponsorship system — kafala, in Arabic, which controls the way domestic workers live — into the spotlight.

The young woman was identified as Barcotan Dupree on Ethiopian news websites. Subsequent interviews released on Ethiopian social media (translated for Al-Monitor by a domestic worker who prefers to remain anonymous) reveal that Dupree had been beaten by her sponsor on several occasions. We also discovered that she once escaped from her sponsor’s house, but returned because she had “nowhere else to stay.” She’s now being cared for at the Caritas Lebanon Migrant Center.

While obviously disturbing, there’s nothing about this story that should surprise us. The kafala system puts the domestic worker’s legal status in the hands of her employer, or “sponsor,” leaving an estimated 250,000 migrant workers, mostly women of South/Southeast Asian and African origins, vulnerable to both physical and mental abuse and exploitation.

Because of this complete legal dependency, most migrant workers being abused are faced with choosing between enduring the abuse, fleeing (thus becoming an illegal resident of Lebanon) or ending their lives. Leaving the country is rarely an option as they require the approval of their employer, who often withhold their documents, including their passports. As KAFA, a prominent Lebanese civil society organization, aptly summarized in a 2012 report, “in effect the [kafala] system reinforces the dependency, the master/servant dynamic, and the power imbalance between Lebanese employers and migrant domestic workers.”