(first part of 2)
WHEN it comes to issues of trafficking in women, University of California-Davis professor Rhacel Parreñas should be taken seriously: She has been in the eddy of Japan’s entertainment industry.
Parreñas, who is teaching Asian-American studies, spoke recently to the OFW Journalism Consortium to chide the United States’s policy addressing trafficking worldwide as "won’t-work, will-fail" path.
Stopping the migration of workers won’t stem the traffic in women, she said adding that the US State Department’s "3-P" –prosecution, protection, and prevention– approach only "conflates [blend or fuse together] the experiences of all trafficked persons."
Power is the issue here, Parreñas said.
"Filipino women are being recruited through the use of power for the purpose of exploitation," she added.
Parreñas was reacting to the recent Trafficking in Persons Report of the US State Department. The Americans are forcing Japan and the Philippines to tighten immigration and employment rules governing the entry of workers in Japan as well as those already in the country.
The Filipino professor said the "top-bottom approach" to curb the trafficking chain will only worsen women’s already-vulnerable conditions.
Instead of US and Japanese officials’ "top-bottom" solutions, Parreñas said there should be better working conditions for Filipina entertainers and that the middlemen involved in their migration should be eliminated.
Her "grassroots" proposals, she asserts, are "empirically-grounded" and will improve the conditions of migrants.
The "empirical grounds" come from Parreñas’s first-hand experience as a bar girl in Tokyo.
Been there
IT was last year when Parreñas wore thigh-high skirts and walked from table to table in a cheap pub in Tokyo, Japan.
In-between putting bottles of sake (Japanese rice wine) on tables and singing songs for Japanese painters, carpenters, and those who claim they’re members of organized crime syndicates, Parreñas interviewed 61 entertainers for her project Trafficked? Filipino Migrant Hostesses in Japan’s Nightlife Industries.
Like those women, she also went out with some customers on dohan or afternoon dates. (to be continued next issue) /MP mailto:madyaas_pen@yahoo.com
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