Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual harassment.

In her six years of experience working as a caregiver in the suburbs of Chicago, Myrla Baldonado—a human rights organizer who emigrated from the Philippines to the United States in 2006—had served 30 different clients. Out of those 30, she was sexually harassed by eight.

There was the older woman who would ask her to grab her private parts while Baldonado bathed her. There was the elder man who would expose himself as she tucked him into bed. There was the son of a lady who suffered a stroke who would openly talk about finding his mother’s dildo while alone with Baldonado at night.

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On one particular evening in the middle of winter, she says that her client’s husband had attempted to sneak into her room in the dark. While she feared what he might do to her as she lay in bed, she didn’t know where to turn for help.

“What are you going to do?” she recalls asking herself. “I just hid somewhere else and locked the door.”

It’s not an experience unique to Baldonado. Since her days of toiling as a caregiver in Chicago and now working as a full-time organizer at the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California, the 68-year-old advocate says that she’s come across plenty of fellow domestic workers who have been subjugated to similar cases of sexual violence while on the job.

“It’s hidden. It’s...

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