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Authors: Stephanie Hepburn
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they have different professional guidelines. According to Ryland, the victim may not immediately give service providers permission to share information with law enforcement:
We are bound by a duty of confidentiality, and we understand that there are certain barriers that you have to get over to build trust with your client before they will (a) tell us the whole story and (b) grant us permission to share that story with someone else. However, law enforcement does not always realize that building trust takes time. They don’t always understand why a victim wouldn’t readily identify himself or herself as a victim of human trafficking.
Another obstacle to building a relationship with police, Ryland said, is the pressure put on local law enforcement: “It seems that local law enforcement has to meet a certain number of convictions for prostitution. For instance, they [law enforcement] may charge a person with prostitution and not drop the charges even when the person is found to be a victim of human trafficking.” 21
Although the United States has taken significant measures to counter human trafficking worldwide as well as nationally, there exists a conflict between the objective of the TVPA to protect and assist victims of trafficking and that of ICE to combat illegal immigration. Those found in raids are often arrested and deported without a thorough evaluation as to whether they are trafficking victims. Such practices not only fail to protect and assist potential victims of trafficking, but also result in the deportation of critical witnesses, which significantly weakens the case against their traffickers. Hopefully, the removal of arrest quotas from the Fugitive Operations Program will help shift the focus so that traffickers and corporations that benefit from the exploitation of trafficked persons become the target of ICE instead of those who have been exploited.
CHAPTER 2
Japan
I apologize to those Brazilians or Peruvians who came to Japan with high hope[s]. Our policy was very wrong. We just wanted the cheap labor, but we don’t want to open our market to … foreign countries.
—TARO KONO, MEMBER OF THE JAPANESE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 2009
Japan has a hyperthriving sex industry amounting to $3 billion a year (Hughes, Sporcic, Mendelsohn, & Chirgwin, 1999; McNeill, 2004). Sex is openly advertised, yet conservative attitudes persist toward the open discussion of sex. According to James Farrer, former director of the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University in Tokyo, this is not a contradiction but rather a reflection of a cultural difference between the West and the East:
In Japan it is acceptable to be a different person during the day versus the night. It is context appropriate. Japanese society doesn’t have the Protestant moral restrictions on sex like [that of] the United States. There has always been a commercial sex industry. For many people the world of the commercial sex industry is a vague and gray area, and they don’t get too bothered by it. Particularly in the cities, it is part of the urban landscape—you see it everywhere. It is seen as something that has its place but not in serious daily life. If kept in its place it is not morally significant. At the same time, the culture is modest, and talking about sex is considered immodest.
1
Michiko Yokoyama, a public outreach program officer at the Japan office of the anti-trafficking group Polaris Project, holds that this cultural dualism fosters ignorance on the issue of trafficking, particularly that of trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation:
There is a lack of social awareness on trafficking issues due to a lack of human rights and sex education at schools, poor media coverage, and the absence of a government campaign on human trafficking. I attended an NGO and government meeting on Japan’s new action plan on human trafficking on December 2, 2009. During the meeting a government official from the Ministry of Health
We are bound by a duty of confidentiality, and we understand that there are certain barriers that you have to get over to build trust with your client before they will (a) tell us the whole story and (b) grant us permission to share that story with someone else. However, law enforcement does not always realize that building trust takes time. They don’t always understand why a victim wouldn’t readily identify himself or herself as a victim of human trafficking.
Another obstacle to building a relationship with police, Ryland said, is the pressure put on local law enforcement: “It seems that local law enforcement has to meet a certain number of convictions for prostitution. For instance, they [law enforcement] may charge a person with prostitution and not drop the charges even when the person is found to be a victim of human trafficking.” 21
Although the United States has taken significant measures to counter human trafficking worldwide as well as nationally, there exists a conflict between the objective of the TVPA to protect and assist victims of trafficking and that of ICE to combat illegal immigration. Those found in raids are often arrested and deported without a thorough evaluation as to whether they are trafficking victims. Such practices not only fail to protect and assist potential victims of trafficking, but also result in the deportation of critical witnesses, which significantly weakens the case against their traffickers. Hopefully, the removal of arrest quotas from the Fugitive Operations Program will help shift the focus so that traffickers and corporations that benefit from the exploitation of trafficked persons become the target of ICE instead of those who have been exploited.
CHAPTER 2
Japan
I apologize to those Brazilians or Peruvians who came to Japan with high hope[s]. Our policy was very wrong. We just wanted the cheap labor, but we don’t want to open our market to … foreign countries.
—TARO KONO, MEMBER OF THE JAPANESE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 2009
Japan has a hyperthriving sex industry amounting to $3 billion a year (Hughes, Sporcic, Mendelsohn, & Chirgwin, 1999; McNeill, 2004). Sex is openly advertised, yet conservative attitudes persist toward the open discussion of sex. According to James Farrer, former director of the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University in Tokyo, this is not a contradiction but rather a reflection of a cultural difference between the West and the East:
In Japan it is acceptable to be a different person during the day versus the night. It is context appropriate. Japanese society doesn’t have the Protestant moral restrictions on sex like [that of] the United States. There has always been a commercial sex industry. For many people the world of the commercial sex industry is a vague and gray area, and they don’t get too bothered by it. Particularly in the cities, it is part of the urban landscape—you see it everywhere. It is seen as something that has its place but not in serious daily life. If kept in its place it is not morally significant. At the same time, the culture is modest, and talking about sex is considered immodest.
1
Michiko Yokoyama, a public outreach program officer at the Japan office of the anti-trafficking group Polaris Project, holds that this cultural dualism fosters ignorance on the issue of trafficking, particularly that of trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation:
There is a lack of social awareness on trafficking issues due to a lack of human rights and sex education at schools, poor media coverage, and the absence of a government campaign on human trafficking. I attended an NGO and government meeting on Japan’s new action plan on human trafficking on December 2, 2009. During the meeting a government official from the Ministry of Health
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