Ten months of physical and mental torture turned her life into a living hell before the police rescued her from her employer's Paribagh house on May 2.

"The madam (her employer) scratched my face or poked me with whatever she could find for my minor mistakes," Mostakina with numerous bruises on her body and raw facial wounds from hot electric iron told the police.

Mostakina is not alone to suffer physical and mental torture by employers. Social workers working in the field say most children working as full-time domestic helps face such brutality more than their adult counterparts.

According to a report prepared by the documentation unit of Ain O Salish Kendra (ASK) based on news reports published in dailies, at least 90 child domestic workers were tortured from January to December last year.

ASK officials said the number could be much higher as not every case gets a chance to be reported in the media.

Among the children, most are female and belong to the age group of 13 to 18. The ASK report also said that 17 of them were killed after physical torture, while three were raped. One was killed after rape in a sign of vulnerability of domestic workers.

Most children from rural areas end up being home helps because of sheer poverty. But it is not always poverty but the hope of a better living that some parents in villages send their children to work.

"I thought they would treat my daughter well and keep her better than I could," said Aklima Begum who sent her daughter Saleha to work as a domestic help in Dhaka. "But they dumped all hazardous work of a family of eight on my 10-year-old daughter," she said.

Sometimes, middlemen bring domestic helps and the parents do not have any direct communication with the employers. The lack of communication keeps the parents living in remote areas completely unaware of the fate of their children.

Some NGO workers said the government should alleviate the domestic workers' plight. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention-138 makes it illegal for children under 14 to be in full-time employment. "But Bangladesh has not endorsed it into legislation -- the reason the child right is violated especially in the case of child domestic workers," said Tahmina Begum, a development activist.

The development workers said the government does not have a monitoring system for the domestic helps. "Have you ever seen any Union Parishad chairman or city corporation commissioner to care about the domestic helps in his area?" a development worker said.

But people's attitude towards domestic helps has changed over the years. "Earlier the employers did not even listen to us, let alone keeping our requests of sending their domestic helps to us," said Geeta Chakroborty working with ASK for child domestic helps.

She also said domestic helps in a few houses are kept like a family member provided with all amenities. "But these positive cases are never exposed, so others cannot learn from them," she said.

The organisation has six Dropping Centres for child domestic workers in the city that offers legal help and health and education to them. "The centres are open from morning to evening and the children can come at any time they want," she said. The centres allow children to do painting, listen to music, read books or whatever they want.