Wanderlust

Elizabeth’s back and in action

July 7, 2007 at 5:08 am elinordye Leave a comment

…And I’m back!  I’ll be with Nora again for the next couple of weeks and am juiced about riding bikes, meeting rad women and practicing yoga on Nora’s iPod.

For the past three weeks I’ve been running a 3 week all-girls hiking and backpacking program.  Motivating and challenging girls to hike up and down hills in the hot heat with 25 pound backpacks was one of the most exhausting things I’ve ever done in my life.  Being on this next part of the bike tour is a much needed break from my everyday work life—I’m excited about what the next couple of weeks brings and am happy to be around Nora again.

A couple of nights ago, I met with Liezl Tomas Rebugio—the human trafficking director from the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum and with Anne—the co-chair of NAPAWF’s Seattle chapter.  To quote directly from their website: NAPAWF is the only national, multi-issue APA women’s organization in the country. NAPAWF’s mission is to build a movement to advance social justice and human rights for APA women and girls.

NAPAWF’s six platform issues are civil rights, economic justice, educational access, ending violence against women, health and reproductive freedom and immigrant and refugee rights.  NAPAWF has hundreds of members nationally and the issues that NAPAWF focuses on grow out of the interests of the membership base.

In 2005 NAPAWF in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Women’s Center convened several women’s organizations that were involved in anti-trafficking work.  From this convening in 2005, NAPAWF came up with some of their guidelines to broaden the discourse from an API women’s perspective.  NAPAWF will be coming out with their anti-trafficking program in the Fall of 2007.

So what is it that sets NAPAWF apart from other anti-trafficking organizations?  In my personal experience of working with anti-trafficking groups, going to conferences and having had worked with trafficked women previously, NAPAWF does an incredible job of critically analyzing the intersection between trafficking, immigration and women’s rights.  They recognize that the term human trafficking encompasses labor, domestic and sex trafficking; and that it is important to recognize the fault in categorizing labor trafficking from sex trafficking because it inherently invalidates sex work, voluntary or forced, as a valid form of labor.  And their stance on the issue truly reflects the opinions and interests of their membership base.

When I asked Liezl how she got involved in human trafficking issues, she told me about her experience interning for an NGO in the Phillipines.  Liezl had learned that Filipinas were incredibly impacted by domestic servitude, militarization and colonization of the Phillipines; many Filipina’s bodies were commodified as they were forced into sex labor.  As a grad student, Liezl spent a year abroad working in the Phillipines for an NGO called the Visayan Forum Foundation–which works for the welfare of marginalized migrants, especially those working in the invisible and informal sectors, like domestic workers, and trafficked women and children.

During her time at the Visayan Forum Foundation, Liezl often thought about what her life would be like had her parents not immigrated over to the US from the Phillipines; it wasn’t terribly difficult to imagine herself or her siblings as someone who could have easily been trafficked.  This personal connection to the work—having spent time in her homeland working on this issue and seeing how it affected her people, has fueled her passion in being the human trafficking director for NAPAWF.

Some facts that Liezl schooled me on human trafficking and specifically in regards to "mail order brides":
 

Within the US alone, there are over 400 International Marriage Brokers (IMBs) that arrange between 8,000 to 12,000 marriages between American men and foreign women.  Many of the foreign women are from Asian countries, like the Phillipines.

Cases of homicide and domestic violence influenced activists to start working on the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act, IMBR, which required customers in the US to provide marital background and criminal history to the women abroad that they were seeking to marry, among other things.  The legislation around IMBR is to protect IMB foreign women from the abuse they experience from their husbands.

In one specific case, Susana Blackwell, a Filipina, married an American man she had met through an IMB.  Shortly after her arrival to the states, her husband became extremely physically abusive.  While in court during divorce procedures, her abusive scum bag of a husband entered the court room and shot and killed her and the two friends that accompanied her to court.
 
For more information about IMBs, IMBRA, NAPAWF and their anti-trafficking program that is coming out soon, please visit: www.napawf.org

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