On domestic abuse and japayuki

I recently came back from Atlanta and the annual Asian American studies conference. I noted a couple of things that I learned at the conference that I thought would be interesting for us to think about on this blog.

The first is factual:

Professor Linda Pierce, a mixed-race Filipina who teaches multi-ethnic American literature at the University of Southern Mississippi, told a roundtable of Filipino Americanists that in southern Mississippi, there are quite a few Filipinas with white husbands and therefore a large population of mixed-race Filipino children. She explicitly said that "penpals are the majority of the Filipino American community" here. She also said, and this was really disturbing, that one of the major problems in this community is domestic abuse. It has gotten so bad that the Filipino Society of Mississippi, which Pierce said is in no way a political entity, has had to stage rescues of these Filipina wives from domestic abuse.

The second is more theoretical:

In her discussion of her research in Japan as a japayuki (Filipino slang for a Filipina working as an entertainer in Japan) alongside Filipina migrant workers also working as japayuki, Professor Rhacel Parreñas of UC Davis made some comments about how "the moral panic embedded in" anti-sex trafficking discourse doesn't take into account the desires of the migrant workers themselves. She noted that when Japan, responding to pressure from the United States (presumably including Filipino Americans in league with others working against the sex trafficking industries), re-designated the Filipina japayuki as "trafficked persons" and therefore wouldn't allow them to renew their contracts to work in Japan, many migrant Filipina japayuki in Japan protested against this bill.

I think that Parreñas brings up an important contradiction between these two sides of the trafficking issue, but I was upset by her dismissive term "moral panic" when talking about those who are anti-sex trafficking. The contradiction or tension is something that we've been talking about on this blog already in relation to pen pals, but I think we can all agree that it is a very complicated and thorny issue -- so complicated that it warrants more than a dismissive comment about people having different moralities. On the one hand, we don't want to deny Filipinas agency, but on the other, we also don't want to ignore the structural problems that present them with the narrow choice of living in poverty or marrying a foreigner they barely know (and as the Mississippi example above indicates, this latter can be quite dangerous). To describe anti-sex trafficking discourse as instigating "moral panic" seems to me an uncritical attempt to shut down further investigation of the issue. Sure there were japayuki who protested the bill, but did all of them do it? Who started the protests? And were they protesting because they thought they weren't trafficked people, or simply because they needed the money and the re-designation was a hindrance to this? There are lots of questions I would have asked before making a judgment.

What do you all think? About either of these things?