Gender and Filipino Labor Migration:
The Case of Violence Against Women Migrant Workers
Edna Aquino
Center for Filipinos - United Kingdom
Introduction
There is a wealth of knowledge on “gender” as a tool to analyze the roles and status of men and women as distinct categories within a target community or population. A gender perspective involves looking at the power dynamics between men and women; the impact of political and socioeconomic developments and processes, e.g., poverty or migration, on men and women. Gender is also increasingly being used as a lens to inform the development of programs and interventions in order to ensure equitable distribution of power and resources for men and women. It is important to highlight that the key motivation underpinning any attempt to introduce a gender perspective is to address the systemic inequality between men and women which remains pervasive in many, if not all, societies despite modernities.
Using a gender analytical framework, women’s rights advocates were the first to flag the growing “feminization of migration” as a growing area of concern requiring serious attention both by the government and migrant rights advocates. Their pioneering work began more than 10 years ago, in the period leading up to the World Conference on Women that took place in Beijing in 1995. Since then, many studies and initiatives to look at “gender and migration” had sprung up. Gender analysis was used to examine, for example, a) the labor market and how it influences the ratio of men and women going abroad; b) the common and different motivations of men and women to migrate; c) the consequences to the families and communities and on individuals when men and women migrate; and d) the women-specific rights implicated in the feminization of migration.
Gender and migration therefore has many facets. My particular take on the subject at this conference is gender-based violence against women migrant workers as the most blatant form of human rights violation that arises as a consequence of the feminization of migration and the associated discrimination against particular sectors of women migrant workers. My particular slant is, of course, gender in human rights because of my professional background. I will begin my presentation with an overview on key concepts of gender and migration and how this relates to “feminization of migration.” I will then describe how certain categories of women migrant workers are being discriminated against and are prone to gender-based violence in the hands of their recruiters, employers or even of the State. The final section of my talk will illustrate that there are non-derogable rights implicated in violence against women migrant workers and that there are non-negotiable obligations on the part of the States – in countries of origin and destination – to guarantee protection to migrant workers and to prevent human rights abuses from being committed against them either by State or non-State actors. The main objective of my presentation is to inform the discussion at the workshop later in the afternoon. I propose that we have further exchanges on the subject of gender and migration and violence against migrant workers during the workshop. I also propose that we aim to put forward some recommendations to the conference regarding concrete measures we can take as migrant rights advocates regarding these issues.
I’ve drawn this contribution from literature and from my own experience as a women’s rights and migrant rights advocate. Exchanges with the growing network of Filipino groups abroad including the Centre for Filipinos in the UK who are at the frontline of securing protection for Filipino migrant workers and human rights campaigning have also provided me with invaluable insights for this presentation.
Key Concepts on Gender and Migration
Gender refers to the relative status, position and relationship between men and women in a given context – in the family, in the community, at the workplace or more broadly, in society. Underlying this concept is the recognition that because of deeply embedded patriarchal values in many societies, women are more disadvantaged than men in many contexts.
In contrast to biological distinction as “male” or “female,” one’s gender as a “man” or a “woman” pertains to social roles, attributes and conduct defined by society as appropriate for men and for women. Society also defines the division of labor between men and women. Prevailing and dominant stereotypes still view women as wives, mothers and consumers while men are the main breadwinners, public figures and producers. Society is also responsible for attaching value to men’s and women’s work. In many contexts, women’s social roles are valued less than that of men.
Gender stereotypes and biases form the basis of discrimination against women depriving them of the opportunity to fully enjoy their rights, e.g., economic and political participation, ownership and control over resources. The intersection of gender with other ‘identities’ such as one’s class, race and ethnicity further exacerbates women’s enjoyment or non-enjoyment of their rights. These are very real issues confronting the lives and struggles of women migrant workers abroad.
Strategies, programming and actions aimed at transforming the structures and processes that have shaped and maintained inequitable social relationships between men and women are the common response by governments and NGOs under the heading of “gender.” Interventions to address gender inequality include:
- collection and analysis of gender-segregated data to illustrate and identify where gaps exist;
- creating an enabling environment through policies and legislation that promote equality of opportunity and equitable access to resources and benefits for men and women;
- practical, immediate measures such as positive discrimination and women-focused programs to bridge the identified gaps and to serve as building blocks toward structural changes.
Applying the gender perspective in migration requires:
- an affirmation that men and women are equally entitled and should enjoy all the rights and freedoms implicated in migration;
- an understanding of the shared and differentiated motivations why men and women migrate;
- an understanding of the similarities and differences in the migration experience of women and men in terms of contributions, vulnerabilities, violations, consequences including policy and program impact;
- a sensitivity towards policies and programs on gender equality ;
- relating gender with other sources of discrimination and inequalities;
- a bias towards empowerment of migrant workers especially towards women’s exercise of choices, access to resources, seeking of remedies, and of claiming their rights; and
- a critical examination and transformation of the structures and processes that have shaped and facilitated gender inequalities.
The term “feminization of migration” was first introduced by women’s rights advocates who applied the gender perspective on migration studies in the 1980s and highlighted the gender-blindness in governments’ and international migration policies and programming as well as in the work of migrant rights advocates. Their findings raised the alarm on the implications of the growing numbers of women in labor migration on themselves, on men, their families and society at large. I would like to make particular reference to the work of institutions like the Scalabrini Migration Center who are one of the first who have highlighted many of the gender dimensions on Filipino labor migration and also to my colleagues, Women’s Rights Advocates, some of whom are in this conference and with whom we were able to lobby the insertion of language on the rights of women migrant workers in the Beijing Platform for Action during the 4th UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in 1995. Until then, most migration studies and policies were based on economic models that regard men as the principal migrant and the primary, if not the only, source of income in a migrant family. Women migrants were largely perceived as those accompanying or joining their family members. Those who migrated to work for example as nurses, health workers, hotel and restaurant workers and domestic workers in North America and Europe as early as during the 50s and 60s were either invisible from the statistics of migration or were hardly given a closer attention and analysis from the gender perspective.
In 1976, 21,960 of the 146,400 Asian overseas workers were women. The figures are now changing. The ILO estimates that women now account for a significant portion of 80 to 100 million migrant workers in the world today. They constitute 50 percent or more of the migrant workers in Asia and Latin America. And are now the principal wage earners for themselves and their families. In the Philippines, women migrants have been exceeding their male counterparts in number since 1992. From 124,822 or 52 percent of Filipino contract workers deployed abroad, the number of women migrant workers soared to 209,822 in 2003 constituting 73 percent of the total Filipino labor force overseas. In 1998, 50 percent of the estimated numbers of Filipino women migrant workers were deployed in the health and service sectors – as nurses, domestic workers, entertainers and caregivers. In the period between 1999 to 2000, about 97 percent of out-migrating Filipino women were deployed as domestic workers and entertainers or overseas professional artists (OPAS). The proportion of Filipino women migrating through illegal, undocumented and clandestine channels who are likely to end up in these job categories have yet to be factored in these statistics.
Women migrant workers are active participants in the development process. Studies in several countries suggest that women are more reliable remitters of savings than men and are significant contributors to the national economy. While sex disaggregated data on Philippine remittances is not available, we can easily draw a conclusion that their contribution to the annual remittances of $8 billion is undoubtedly significant based on the figures that they now comprise more than 70 percent of the total number abroad.
Why More and More Women Are Migrating for Work
UNIFEM, a UN agency that specializes on women’s issues, identified the following factors that influence women migration abroad:
- increasing poverty and insecurity of livelihoods;
- increasing work pressures under globalization’s unregulated market model of development;
- family pressures on women especially in those contexts where women have a greater degree of mobility to work abroad, to complement the family income;
- desire for better living standards, material gratification, more competitive lifestyles, desire for adventure and broader horizons – mostly induced by the media and new information and communications technologies;
- emergence of “women-specific” skilled and unskilled jobs in the formal and informal manufacturing sector;
- the perceived suitability of women in certain sectors because of stereotyped images (domestic service is an extension of women’s traditional role in the home and is not work), submissiveness, suited to simple repetitive tasks, are sources of cheap and flexible type of labor; and
- influence of informal social networks that facilitate, sustain and perpetuate the demand abroad.
Most women move abroad voluntarily but a significant number are forced migrants who have fled conflicts, persecution, environmental degradation, natural disasters and other situations that affect their habitats and livelihoods. Others have been trafficked into sexual exploitation and forced labor.
Violence against Women Migrant Workers
After so many years of advocacy by the global women’s movements challenging the gender-blindness of international law, violence against women (VAW) is now recognized by international and many national laws as a particularly grave human rights violation. VAW “impairs or nullifies the enjoyment by women of human rights and fundamental freedoms” and is a form of discrimination against women.
The UN defines VAW as “any act of gender-based violence that results in or is likely to result in physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty whether occurring in public or in private life.”
The increasing feminization of the Philippine labor export industry suggests that women’s desperation to overcome the hardships brought about by worsening socioeconomic conditions in the country is the major push factor that drives them to leave, to bet on a brighter future abroad – while turning almost a blind eye to the risks involved. Violence against women migrant workers is intrinsically linked to their legal status. As cited in earlier statistics, majority of Filipino women migrant workers are employed at the lowest rung of the occupational hierarchy as domestic workers and entertainers - the so-called 3-D jobs (dirty, demeaning and dangerous) - where they inevitably become targets of discrimination, violence and exploitation. The UN Special Rapporteur on Migrant Workers, in her report last year, cited that society’s low valuation of women and women’s work in these sectors render women migrant workers a “lower class status” and vulnerable to abuse in both the sending and receiving countries. It also implies their being undeserving of fully enjoying their basic rights. They are often excluded from the protection of labor and social legislation rendering their contract of employment meaningless in the absence of grievance mechanisms and a supporting policy environment.
The vulnerabilities of women migrant workers to abuse takes place in the context of a demand-driven rather than a supply driven migrant phenomenon implying unequal economic and political relations between States in the exporting and receiving ends. Sending countries like the Philippines, therefore, have very few and narrow options to demand for better protection of its citizens abroad by receiving countries in this context.
The violence and abuse experienced by women migrant workers can take place during the entire migration process: at home where they are being forced by their families to go abroad against their will, during the recruitment process, sexual harassment by recruiters, in transit and at the workplace in the country of destination.
Violence against women migrant workers takes many forms: from physical, verbal and mental abuse including sexual violence, slave-like working conditions, lack of social contacts through deprivation of liberty and freedom of movement, threats, intimidation and coercion.
Women domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to gender-based violence, including sexual abuse because of their close proximity to and often complete dependence on their employers who are oftentimes the perpetrators of these abuses.
Many of the human rights violations that take place against women migrant workers take place in the so-called “private” domain and committed by private individuals in positions of power and therefore often times are beyond the reach of protection by the government of receiving countries unless they have good legislation that extend protection to women migrant worker who are still being considered foreigners in their country. This makes it very difficult for women to report them or to speak of them with anyone or to seek redress without inviting reprisals or backlash. This is often made worse when the employer keeps from the domestic worker her travel documents and restricts her basic right to leave an abusive working situation and freedom to move.
Shared Vulnerabilities between Women Migrant Workers and Trafficked Women
The issue of trafficking of women and children has been hugging the headlines for the past few months especially after the passing of the optional protocols at the UN Convention on Trafficking and its translation into a national law in the Philippines. I would like to highlight that women migrant workers and trafficked women have shared vulnerabilities when it comes to gender-based violence.
Women who migrate to work and those who have been trafficked could end up in similar situations of exploitation, violence and abuse. Factors that drive women to migrate – either as a documented worker or as a trafficked person- largely overlap. On the other hand, a lucrative market for irregular migration and trafficking is facilitated by restrictive immigration policies and poor governance in countries of origin and destination which manifest in corruption and lack of political will to bring the traffickers to justice. Fear, lack of documentation, the debt bondage to which they are subject in the country of origin in order to pay for the journey, lack of information, fear of being reported to the authorities by the employer, isolation and discrimination against them in their countries of origin and destination often result in low self-esteem, depression and disempowerment and prevent them from invoking their basic rights.
What Are the Rights Implicated in Violence against Women?
Under the UN Women’s Convention, the rights and freedoms implicated in violence against women are:
- the right to life;
- the right not to be subject to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;
- the right to equal protection according to humanitarian norms in times of international or internal armed conflict;
- the right to liberty and security of person;
- the right to equal protection under the law;
- the right to equality in the family;
- the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health; and
- the right to just and favorable conditions of work.
State Response and State Responsibility
International law sets out four levels of obligation for governments who signed and ratified human rights agreements. These responsibilities include the obligation to RESPECT – which specifically requires states to refrain from interfering directly or indirectly with a given right that is recognized under international law.
Second is the obligation to PROTECT – which requires States to take measures that prevent third parties from interfering with the implementation of recognized guarantees.
Third, the obligation to FULFILL - which requires states to take measures to adopt the necessary legislative, administrative, budgetary, judicial, promotional and other means in order to fully realize that right.
Finally, the obligation to PROMOTE – requiring states to take the necessary measures to educate its citizens accordingly and with the various means at its disposal. The general principle of State responsibility requires that when States know, or ought to know, about abuses of human rights and take appropriate steps to prevent the violations, then they bear responsibility for the action. Government non-action sends the message to the citizenry and its law enforcers – those violations against certain rights are justified and will not be punished.
In order to avoid such an accusation, general human rights standards demand that states demonstrate due diligence by taking active measures to prosecute and punish private actors who violate these rights.
Based on these principles, it is my view that governments in the Philippines and in countries of transit and destination share responsibilities in protecting the human rights of migrant workers and trafficked persons and in preventing unlawful acts such as gender-based violence from occurring at each stage of the migration process. I would like to illustrate my assertion through two cases of violence against women migrant workers.
The Case of Domestic Workers in the United Kingdom
In the wake of the First Gulf War in the late 1980s, wealthier families from the Gulf sought refuge in England bringing with them domestic workers in their employ under a special concession granted by the Thatcher government. The Concession allowed foreign employers from the Gulf to bring their domestic workers into the UK with their visas attached to that of their employers. This arrangement essentially removed the responsibility from the UK government to guarantee protection to the foreign domestic workers while closing the doors for them to exercise their basic, non-derogable rights being enjoyed by citizens in the country. The Centre for Filipinos (CF) and its partners in the United Kingdom documented more than 3,000 cases of abuses by employers – from non-fulfillment of contractual obligations to gender-based violence which persisted as they moved their sites of employment. Evidence shows a clear pattern of abuse on the part of employers and which is clearly in breach of international labor and human rights standards. We were also able to establish a consistent pattern of inaction on the part of the governments in countries of origin, of transit and destination to protect the domestic workers and guarantee their rights. On the basis of these findings, a campaign to reform the UK employment and immigration laws was launched and eventually it succeeded. Full employment, legal and citizenship rights were granted to the affected foreign domestic workers.
The Case of Overseas Performing Artists (OPAs) in Japan
In 1991, the plight of Filipino women migrant workers in Japan caught public attention with the mysterious death of Maricris Sioson, 19 years old who worked as an OPA in a club in Fukushima, Japan. Maricris, like many OPAs in the country, lived in a cramped room and was forced to go out on dates with her Japanese male customers under the dohan system – a common practice among Japanese entertainment clubs employing women from abroad in order to generate more revenues. The investigation on the events surrounding her death showed that Maricris was subjected to strict controls by her employer who had connections with the Japanese mafia, the Yakuza. The body showed signs of physical abuse but the Japanese authorities discounted the possibility of foul play or murder. Maricris’ death prompted the Philippine government to review its overseas employment policies and attempted to introduce reforms purportedly to provide protection for its migrant workers.
Years later, not only were the reforms unsustained; developments in the Philippine government’s policy on OPAs have rendered the death of Maricris and the work of migrant rights advocates on behalf of OPAs meaningless. Almost 15 years after the death of Maricis, Japan remains one of the top five destination countries of Filipino migrant workers - a large percentage of them women working as OPAs. In 2002 alone, records by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) showed that 69,986 out of a total of 73,246 Filipinos deployed to Japan were women. They remain unprotected and are subjected to employment contract violations such as being forced to undertake “hostessing” work, delayed/under payment/non-payment of wages and overtime pay, no workers’ life and health insurance, sexual harassment, non-implementation of rest dates, forced dating through the dohan and transfer of work sites without prior consultation and their consent. Women OPAs are also subjected to short-term employment and immigration policies which further add to their vulnerabilities and force them to either enter into ill-informed relationships with men who promise them a steady source of support and tenure in the country or to go “underground” or become “undocumented.” Either way, the relationships they entered into are, in many cases, similarly marked by violence instigated by institutions or men in positions of power.
Evidence drawn from a study conducted by the Development Action for Women Network (DAWN) Philippines6 illustrates how the Philippine government, through its policy and processes associated with the recruitment and deployment of women OPAs including its recent 1991 rule to lower the required age of women who can be deployed as OPAs from 21 to 18, have legitimized their entry into the Japan’s sex industry. For its active role in deploying women OPAs to Japan, the Philippine government bears the brunt of responsibility for acts of gender-based violence experienced by them as a consequence. Likewise, the Japanese government shares equal responsibility for not enforcing strict rules to protect women OPAs that enter its territory and for allowing impunity of the perpetrators. I will not go further into describing the details of how the Philippine and Japanese governments have failed to uphold human rights guarantees for women OPAs. The DAWN report should be commended for its research and for unraveling States’ responsibilities, both on the parts of the Philippine and Japanese governments, through the gender and human rights lenses. The report now serves as an important foundation for advocacy on human rights of OPAs by migrant rights’ groups in the Philippines and in Japan.
Conclusion
The Philippines has a very good standing in the international community for having signed and ratified all the major international human rights instruments and for being one of the first to have signed and ratified the Migrant Workers Convention. It also has a relatively good track record in reflecting its accession to international human rights treaties into national legislation.
But the Philippines is also the 3rd largest recipient of “migrant-dollars” in the world which has helped shore up an economy that is heavily in debt, has a chronic balance of trade problem and is even now, in the midst of what many call a “crisis.” And this is the basis of its major source of dilemma and of its complicity in the unabated human rights violations against its migrant workers abroad.
Much of the current literature on the migrant workers phenomenon has focused on the issue of economic and financial gains they are generating for the local economies. The increasing international discussion on migration is being undertaken, not so much within the framework of migrants’ rights and women’s rights as a development concern in itself, but rather in reaction to the huge impact of monetary flows emanating from overseas workers to their home countries. Government’s migration policies have remained silent and are ill-informed of the implications of this feminization of migration as illustrated in the case of those who migrate to work as domestic workers and OPAs. The rights issue becomes an insert, a footnote to the main discourse and the heightened interest of the government and multilateral lending institutions in the subject, for instance, bears closer scrutiny in this respect. “Migra-dollars” is gaining increasing currency in high-level financial and development circles potentially reducing the value of the migrant worker to being an economic factor.
To us who have worked as migrant workers or as advocates for them, this flaw must seem quite obvious as obvious as the fact that an individual’s human rights do not derive from whether one sends money home or not, or by how much.
But more serious is the peril that the UN Convention on Migrant Workers’ Rights seeks to address. The current level of discourse – when reduced to financial terms – can so easily absolve both host and sending governments from fulfilling their responsibilities, first in tackling the fundamental problems that triggered the Filipino diaspora in the first place and second, in recognizing and upholding the rights and welfare of migrant workers wherever they are.
Feminization of migration is far from a neutral concept. It involves a huge array of violations of women’s rights, including their safety and protection. The specific types of vulnerabilities of domestic workers and OPAs and those of undocumented migrant workers are in theory reasonably well covered by international conventions and human rights law, but the reality of implementation and enforcement of these is dismally poor – in both the sending and receiving countries.
Ending the gender-based violence experienced by women migrant workers require us, as migrant rights advocates, to revisit our own assumptions about migration and to bring to the fore the distinct struggles of these women. Migrant advocacy networks at both ends of the mig-ration chain need to take concerted efforts in framing migrant women-related issues in terms of a human rights discourse, on similar lines as the ongoing campaigning on “women’s rights as human rights.” We play a pivotal role in raising the visibility of the issue and challenging the power dynamics implicit in labor migration, between both the labor importing and exporting countries. The advocacy role of NGOs has great potential to bridge the difficult nexus between citizenship and human rights, as well as to link the issues of women migrant workers with other global human rights concerns. In this sense, the export of labor is not approached purely as an issue for migration policies but is increasingly emerging as part of holistic development policies covering the political, economic, cultural and social aspects of governance, of our own citizenship and therefore of civil societies. |
