DIMENSIÓN EFICIENCIA

My name is Rhacel Parrenas and I am a Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. I am speaking here as a qualitative sociologist who has done extensive research on women’s labor migration from the Philippines. I have written books and numerous essays on migrant domestic workers, the families of migrant workers as well as migrant hostesses.

“Sex trafficking” became an issue that I had to address when migrant Filipina hostesses in Japan, a group of labor migrants who I had been studying, were labeled by the U.S. Department of State as sex trafficked people. As the 2005 TIP Report states, “A significant number of the 71,084 Philippine women who entered Japan as overseas performance artists in 2004 are believed to have been women trafficked into the sex trade”(178). Justifying claims of their trafficking, they were described in the 2004 TIP Report as “victims… stripped of their passports and travel documents and forced into situations of sexual exploitation or bonded servitude...”(14). I should qualify that the labeling as trafficked persons of 80,000 plus migrant Filipina hostesses in 2005 made them the largest group of trafficked people worldwide or 10 percent of the 800,000 estimated trafficked persons in the world.

The label of sex trafficked persons is one that has directly affected the migration of Filipina hostesses. It has led to a drastic reduction in their numbers. Since 2006, their annual entry has hovered at around 8,000. Many would consider this drastic decline as a victory in the war on trafficking. It marks their successful rescue. But I care to differ. As a gender and migration scholar, I actually see this drastic decline as nothing but a threat to the empowerment of migrant women and an end to the gains they have made in migration, including their acquired role as breadwinners of the family. The curtailment of their migration signals not their rescue but instead their domination, specifically their job elimination and their forcible unemployment. We need to listen to Filipina hostesses in Japan and figure out why many of them asked me, in reaction to their labeling as sex trafficked persons by the U.S. government, “Why is your government making our lives difficult?”

To make sense of this question, we need to understand the disjuncture between the goals of the U.S. anti-trafficking campaign, including organizations they fund such as Polaris Project –Japan, and the goals of the Filipina hostesses who they wish to save. Why do Filipina hostesses, for the most part, view their rescue from “sex trafficking” and the pressures imposed on the government of Japan to more tightly monitor their migration as nothing but an act of domination, an elimination of their freedom to choose their employment?

One central cause of this disjuncture is the different view of the job of hostess work that comes from outsiders, such as the U.S. government, and insiders, specifically the hostesses. To

understand this disjuncture, we first need to know what the U.S. means by sex trafficking. In TVPA, “sex trafficking” is defined as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.” This definition notably removes the factor of coercion, basically equating “commercial sex act” with exploitation. So this would make hostesses – women who engage in the sexual titillation of their clients but I should note not necessarily via physical contact but by flirting – sex trafficked persons. This makes me wonder then if the labeling of hostesses as trafficked persons comes from the conflation of sex work and sex trafficking. This conflation leads to the misunderstanding of their job – the false assumption that these women are not willing to be where they are but had somehow been duped and forced to be there.

This false assumption is likely to happen because much of our knowledge on sex trafficking – including the claims on the trafficking of Filipina hostesses in Japan – is not based on substantive research. Notably, even the US Government Accountability Office has critiqued the TIP Report for being based on scant information. I am here giving a briefing on civil rights and sex trafficking. But I am not here to say that sex trafficking is a civil rights violation but instead I want to show you that false claims of sex trafficking is a civil rights violation. I have come to realize that the civil rights of Filipina hostesses have actually been violated not by sex trafficking but by the false claims of their trafficking. False claims of their sex trafficking in the TIP Report, and the efforts to rescue them by various well-intentioned organizations, have imposed unwarranted infringement on the liberty of migrant Filipina hostesses, placing their individual freedom at risk.

Without question, the absence of due diligence in the part of the U.S. Department of State and the organizations they have funded to help Filipina hostesses and the false claims of their sex trafficking has violated the civil rights of this group. First, it has eliminated their jobs, forcing the return of Filipina hostesses to their life of abject poverty in the Philippines. What rescuers fail to consider is that Filipina hostesses are not clueless idiots when they go to Japan; often they go to Japan knowing that they will be flirting for money and knowing that they will be working in servitude with a visa that is contingent on their employment at only one club (notably a common condition of migrant work around the world). However, we should not ignore that they knowingly choose the unfreedom of servitude in Japan over the unfreedom of poverty in the Philippines. Labeling them as sex trafficked persons basically eliminates their choice of two unfreedoms and forces them to a life of unfreedom in poverty. Second, the civil rights of Filipina hostesses have been violated by the false claims of their trafficking because it has exacerbated the conditions of servitude for the few who still manage to return to Japan. To improve their ranking in the US TIP Report, Japan now requires Filipina hostesses to go through two years and not just six months of singing and dancing lessons. What this does is it increases their debt to their brokers prior to migration, aggravating their indenture. Third, false claims of their trafficking has not just violated their civil rights but has ironically left them more vulnerable to what is labeled as severe forms of trafficking. We have seen since a spike in the number of

marriage visa applications, with some local migrant advocates suspecting many of these are based on false marriages. Ironically, the Philippine Embassy in Tokyo has long said that hostesses who enter with false visas rather than contract workers are those most vulnerable to forced labor in Japan, i.e., women in this group are those more likely than contract workers to find themselves working at a place without a network of support and without the ability to quit or end their employment. Lastly, citing the dissertation research of my PhD student at Brown University Maria Hwang, the false claim of migrant Filipina hostesses as sex trafficked persons has not only denied them their jobs but have forced many to engage in prostitution in Hong Kong, which is a job many of them would actually not do if they could still perform the meeker sexual job of commercial flirtation in Japan. This unintended consequence of the U.S. war on trafficking surely gives us reason to pause and forces us to rethink how we should address the problem of human trafficking.

To conclude, we need to do our due diligence on sex trafficking. Claims based on scant information, the conflation of sex work and sex trafficking, and the use of one person’s experience to generalize about an entire group’s experience only results in our misunderstanding of the problem. This misunderstanding then leads to the implementation of the wrong solutions. We see this clearly in the rescue of Filipina hostesses – supposed victims of sex trafficking – but whose labeling as such does nothing but violate their civil rights. If we respect the people we want to rescue, we would owe it to them to do our due diligence and do grounded empirical research to understand their problems. Anyone who does that with Filipina hostesses – the largest group of supposed sex traffic victims in the world – would learn that they don’t want job elimination. They wish not to be rescued. Instead they want greater control of their labor and migration, including the ability to choose employers, the elimination of migrant brokers, and the recognition of their form of sex work as viable employment.