La Gestión Educativa:

In considering human trafficking, choice, and agency, it is the available options as

perceived that shape actions. Erica experienced her life at times as chaos as she navigated the conflicting pressures on her life. She went out to work to earn money for her family, but it was also an escape from abuse and poverty. Erica’s life as a young person reveals an increasing trajectory towards insecurity in the financial, social, and relational aspects of her life. When Erica was trafficked into the sex industry, she was personally at a point where there seemed to be few options available to her. Crystal was in a similar position and remaining at home was neither appealing nor financially stable. Both Joramae and Crystal found that as mothers, they had few options that were sufficient or available to provide for their children. Human trafficking has been linked with gendered inequality and the

feminisation of poverty, where women have unequal “local access to sustainable

livelihoods,” and gender-based forms of structural violence that compound the experience of poverty and unemployment (Beckerleg & Hundt, 2005, p. 187; Turner, 2012, p. 38). However, within these constrained circumstances, each young woman made choices to try to find work elsewhere as the known situations were not sufficient. Crystal and Erica left their homes and bore the risk of violence in response to the known violences of poverty, abuse and discrimination.

As is evident in these stories, human trafficking is often closely connected to other events in a person’s life history that led to their vulnerability to exploitation – poverty, lack of education, abuse. What is often not discussed is how it can also be related to the subsequent events and choices that a person faces. For Erica, the point of trafficking as an entry into sexual labour turned out to be - financially speaking - a success for her. But it also set a chain of events in motion that she had not intended, and she had to find new ways to deal with life and make choices within this situation. Like Erica, Crystal turned to drugs and alcohol to endure the forced sexual labour, but once she was addicted it became even more difficult to leave or even imagine alternatives. For them, drug use corresponded to Coy’s (2012, p. 112) findings with British sexual labourers as a “dissociative mechanism that begins as an emotional survival strategy.” Crystal chose marriage as a way out of the sex

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industry, but after having spent her teen years there, she had no education or marketable skills which could have sustained her after her husband vanished.

The social workers had taken Joramae from the world of sexual labour, with justifiable rationale according to her young age, but in doing so they have taken away her livelihood without providing a viable alternative. Her partner’s work as a trisikad driver is minimal and can fluctuate; Joramae and the baby are again primarily dependent upon her husband’s and father’s abilities to provide for them. Sex workers rights groups have argued that the criminalisation and removal of their livelihood is a form of oppression (Saini, 2016, p. 5). At the same time, sexual labour can be a dangerous and volatile profession, and the older street-based women that I met were finding it more and more difficult to make a living;52

without other skills to fall back on, the future did not seem bright. Like domestic labour, sexual labour does not provide career progression or skill development (Pacis, 2009); in fact, the opposite can be true as these intimate labours are highly dependent on youth, and over time workers’ labour often becomes less rather than more valuable.

Particularly in this marginalised and moralised industry, for both Erica and Crystal to genuinely leave and pursue new directions required a large amount of effort in constructing new identities, over time and based on relationships. Erica acknowledged that as a non- virgin she was already somehow morally tarnished socially, but she still contrasted this identity with the practice of sexual labour that she was being forced to undertake. The position of sexual labourers in society as “bad” may be intended to deter some from embarking on this path, but also makes it difficult for people to transition out of it. In the context of conscripting underage soldiers, Wessells (2006, p. 94) commented:

Rape is a powerful means of subjugation since it profoundly violates girls’ sense of safety and bodily integrity and can lead girls to see themselves as impure and damaged. Rape also casts a large stigma on the survivors, who may be shunned or otherwise treated badly by others, including people from whom they need support. This is often true in the Philippines where sex and sexual labour is heavily moralised and stigmatised, and particularly so when rape or forced sexual labour is the entry to the sex industry. Indeed, “bad” is part of how the Mama-san street worker I knew described her job

52_{See Susan’s story (Chapter 9) for further discussion; Susan is a street-based sexual labourer in her forties}

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to me – “I am the manager for the bad girls.” Once the women had internalised and accepted on some level that they were outside of legitimate society, it created a chasm between their work, relationships, and position in society and the rest of “good” society and work.

Relationships were significant throughout these women’s stories. Erica liked dancing and enjoyed her relationships with the other women at the club, and she also formed

relationships with men over this time. Erica and Crystal found that financially dependent relationships with men they met at the clubs allowed them to exit that lifestyle, at least for a time. However, both expressed a combination of financial reliance and their own choices in forming these relationships. Like other Filipinas who had been trafficked into the sex industry, the women initially left home to pursue work because of their relational responsibilities and hopes for their families (Erpelo, 1998, p. 125). Both experienced various forms of hardship and rejection from their families; however, both ultimately ended up willingly and happily supporting the same family members. Joramae began commercial sexual labour for the sake of her baby; now, she is highly dependent on other family

members, and her relationships are positive but financially uncertain. In Erica and Crystal’s lives, long-term and involved relationships were key to being able to leave the sex industry many years after having been trafficked. Relationships enabled identity shifts as the women became part of different communities, began to pursue their educations, and saw

themselves as other things than sexual labourers. Crystal found that as she became involved with women’s and sexual labourers’ activist groups, she was presented with ideas about womanhood and women’s rights that profoundly altered her sense of self, and

subsequently, the way she acted in the world.

These stories illustrate some of the issues in defining both age and agency in terms of sexual labour and coercion. Joramae, for example, expressed more control in having chosen sexual labour at about age sixteen than Crystal did at 24 in accepting a second bar position because she felt she had no other options. Crystal saw little difference between being forced and tricked into sexual labour as a fifteen year-old and having to return later due to

hardship, although this also drew on her earlier experiences. Erica and Crystal both acknowledged that their young age was part of the vulnerability as well as trauma in their

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experiences of trafficking. Joramae’s story is clearly very different from Erica and Crystal’s forced entries to sexual labour; legally, however, there is little distinction. Indeed, the events that led to the designation of Joramae as having been trafficked – having been transported and engaged in underage sexual labour – were described as also having been a lot of fun for Joramae and Julia, and a rare experience of abundant shopping and

holidaying. Gardening, although useful, is unlikely to provide these experiences, and there are few if any jobs domestically where Joramae will ever earn what she did in sexual labour.

Erica and Crystal’s stories indicate that the factors that maintained conditions of exploitation (caused initially by a person or group exploiting another) are complex combinations of individual choice and agency, and social factors far beyond as well as within the employment relationships. Beyond her initial introduction to erotic dancing and sexual labour, Erica was able to walk out of the club and in theory could have moved away, gone home, found other work, or anything else; her experience, however, also included other factors which severely limited her ability to do this. Joramae, Crystal, and Erica’s voluntary experiences were all constrained by necessity and lack of options, but hardship does not eclipse the role of agency in evaluating and choosing among the limited options available for survival. Seeing the complexity, social positionality and meanings, and personal agency does not negate recognising the unequal position of women in society, but emphasises the complex and particular context that women navigate in sexual labours. Sexual labour “like other forms of commodification and consumption can be read in more complex ways than simply as a confirmation of male domination… it can be understood as a place of agency where the sex worker makes active use of the existing social order” (Chapkis, 1997, pp. 29–30). It has been observed that women trafficked into the sex industry frequently choose to either remain or return even when they have the option of leaving, often from a lack of other economic alternatives, as Crystal did (Erpelo, 1998; Urada et al., 2016). In this way, women like Erica and Crystal have turned their experiences into opportunities that would serve them; these choices, however, were also constrained by other social factors including the stigma attached to commercial sex.

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The real-life context and experience of voluntary sexual labourers in the Philippines is far more complex than its legal or illegal status, and is significantly shaped by gender-based inequalities and socio-economic conditions (Beckerleg & Hundt, 2005; Khan et al., 2017; Schwarz et al., 2017, p. 20; Swanson, 2016, p. 593). In the Philippines context, there is no way to know whether legalised commercial sex would have benefitted Erica and Crystal either long-term or in escaping initially, or whether it would have enabled those who

trafficked them. The context for sexual labour, coercion, power relations and sex trafficking is not limited to the law. A case where human trafficking of minors into sexual labour was successfully prosecuted in the Philippines raises further questions about power structures and accountability: a young woman was charged for recruiting others to a private club for sexual labour, but no charges were brought against the business owners who had directed her and most likely hired her initially as a minor and therefore made her, under legal definitions, a trafficking victim herself (Chapman, 2017). The law did not address the power structures that maintain the marginalisation of sexual labourers, and in this case reinforced and compounded them.

As has been observed in Manila and other locations, women trafficked into the sex industry worked alongside others who had entered voluntarily, suggesting both the prevalence of human trafficking and the invisibility of even voluntary sexual labourers in the Philippines (Urada et al., 2016; Wiss, 2012). The violences and risks associated with sexual labour in the Philippines include the abuses and non-payment of clients, the control or abuse of managers, the continuums of control, force, and coercion that lead to women entering or continuing in sexual labour out of force or necessity, as well as the social marginalisation in the wider community. Sexual labourers in the Philippines who were initially trafficked have demonstrably worse health outcomes than those not trafficked (Urada et al., 2016, 2014); violence is compounding, and they have begun with more violence against their life and person. “Why doesn’t she just leave” is often implicitly asked of women in this industry who say they would prefer not to be there – as did all of the street workers that I met - but this question assumes there are other options, there is somewhere they could go where this type of work would not be necessary for survival (Price, 2012).

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A common question in the literature is, what do trafficked persons as well as sexual labourers need – is it rescuing or something else? Perhaps at the very beginning when they were forced into sexual labour Erica and Crystal would have benefitted from rescue; beyond this, what they needed was significantly more complicated. Brennan (2017, pp. 493–494) described how after exiting trafficking, with no social networks or significant skills, formerly trafficked people in the USA often remained in extreme poverty and precarious labour, while anti-trafficking GOs and NGOs would most often discuss the emotional and psychological needs after exiting trafficking. Brennan (2017, p. 490) described decision-making and planning for the future as central to rebuilding a life after trafficking, but this was difficult when basic needs were not being met. There is a clear contrast between Pia’s long-term planning and Joramae’s focus on immediate, day-to-day needs. Joramae had immediately adopted the cultural role of sacrificial mother, and she compared the freedom she had when she was single rather than before motherhood. I cannot help but see the deeply ingrained gender norms as a limiting form of structural violence, where at age seventeen Joramae had mostly abandoned her ambitions for her own life – and where her “rescue” had not given her a stable path for the future. Erica and Crystal, in contrast, had renewed hopes and plans despite their significant family

responsibilities over the years – supported by long-term relationships, they had chosen and navigated their own paths forward.

Conclusions

Gendered poverty and gendered unemployment are both forms of structural violence that affect women’s entry into sexual labour; they also contribute to the vulnerability to trafficking for sexual labour where women, particularly young women, have limited and risky options by which to fulfil their familial obligations. The illegality of sexual labour and treatment of workers are often experienced as forms of structural violence from the state, and more so in parts of the Philippines where the law is abused by corrupt officials to extort and control sexual labourers. Coerced and forced sexual labour is supported by gender inequality and limitations for women’s labour opportunities, as well as the stigma and marginalisation of women once involved. The violence that these women experienced went

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beyond the trafficking events, as structural violences created vulnerability and blocked escape.

The women’s stories presented in this chapter challenge the dominant anti-trafficking narrative of “rescue, rehabilitation, reintegration” and similar variations. Joramae was most clearly rescued, but while the experience was positive and supportive, it has not “rescued” her from the financial constraints and lack of options that initially supported her decision to undertake sexual labour. Erica and Crystal, in contrast, were given support from NGOs that did not remove them from their environments, but offered long-term, relationship-based support, and realistic additional choices.

Women’s inequality, in terms of physical violence, economics, and social position, is a form of structural violence that is a “universal problem” which has been called a “global epidemic” (Dhal, 2018; Sinha, Gupta, Singh, & Srivastava, 2017). The Philippines context shares the unequal position of women within society but configured according to its unique culture and history. As Anderson (2015, p. 61) found with women who sold sex in Malawi, despite deep inequality, “injustice is not experienced passively.” The women I met

navigated the constraints and obstacles to achieve their own aims, even in situations of exploitation. However, the majority of voluntary and formerly trafficked sexual labourers I met expressed the same desire – an economically and practically viable alternative that would allow them to provide for their families. As yet, labour opportunities, particularly for women, and even more so for women without tertiary education, are not sufficient to displace sexual labour as a uniquely lucrative option, nor to present rural labour migrants with sufficient opportunities to pass up dubious recruitment offers.

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6. Working in Mindanao: labour trafficking and employment