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April 2002 - Actions to Revolutionize the World
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Women's Marching Feet
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A purple rose to denounce sex trafficking"Sex trafficking is a systematic transport of humans across borders within and outside the country for the purpose of trade in sex. This leads to prostitution of victims who are mostly women and children…." It goes hand in glove with violent practices: rape, sexual abuse and murder. GABRIELA, an association coordinating a number of women's organizations in the Philippines, has denounced the Western practice of choosing "mail order brides," the hiring of dancers and bar hostesses in Japan, the sale of Filipino women to Nigeria to work as prostitutes, etc. Since 1985 women activists have battled the causes of this kind of trafficking: the Government of Philippines' policy of selling the economy to transnational company interests has generated a rural exodus and poverty. GABRIELA launched a campaign in 1998 whose emblem was a purple rose, the product of 30 years of cross-breeding. "It is artificial and yet no different from any other rose: it looks the same, smells the same, has thorns, leaves, stems, roots. But it was forced to be different. The purple rose exists not for its own evolutionary purposes but for the pleasure of others," which is why the organization likens women and child victims of sex trafficking to this flower. As part of its actions for the World March of Women, GABRIELA demonstrated on behalf of Filipino women immigrants in Hong Kong. In October 2000, demonstrators in Vancouver, Canada, denounced the mass importation of domestic workers under the federal program called Live-in Caregiver (LCP). The program allows "tens of thousands of women from the Philippines to enter Canada as cooks, laundresses and domestics for Canadian families. Being modern-time slaves, they are forced to live and work in their employers' houses." Some labour force recruiters in the West attract young women by offering them an office job. Once the women arrive in the host country, in fact the only job open to them is prostitution. |
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Last modified 2006-03-23 03:09 PM This item is available in Français, English, Español |
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