Illicit Flirtations: Acclaimed author Rhacel Parreñas explores sex trafficking and the Mafia in Tokyo.

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(Free-Press-Release.com) September 21, 2011 -- Parreñas offers a scholarly, sociological portrait of Filipina hostesses and waitresses in Tokyo’s red-light districts that is clear and compelling enough for the lay reader... Parreñas illustrates why their diminishing numbers is not a “victory” in the global anti-trafficking campaign… To write this book, the author herself worked as a hostess in a Tokyo nightclub; her immersion in the world lends the book powerful authenticity.
Publishers Weekly Review – 8/29/2011

In 2004, the U.S. State Department declared Filipina hostesses in Japan the largest group of sex trafficked persons in the world. Since receiving this global attention, the number of hostesses entering Japan has dropped by nearly 90 percent—from more than 80,000 in 2004 to just over 8,000 today. To some, this might suggest a victory for the global anti-trafficking campaign, but Rhacel Parreñas counters that this drastic decline—which stripped thousands of migrants of their livelihoods—is a setback.

Parreñas worked alongside hostesses in a working-class club in Tokyo's red-light district, serving drinks, singing karaoke, and entertaining her customers, including members of the yakuza, the Japanese crime syndicate. While the common assumption has been that these hostess bars are hotbeds of sexual trafficking, Parreñas quickly discovered a different world of working migrant women, there by choice, and, most importantly, where none were coerced into prostitution. But this is not to say that the hostesses were not vulnerable in other ways.

Illicit Flirtations challenges our understandings of human trafficking and calls into question the U.S. policy to broadly label these women as sex trafficked. It highlights how in imposing top-down legal constraints to solve the perceived problems—including laws that push dependence on migrant brokers, guest worker policies that bind migrants to an employer, marriage laws that limit the integration of migrants, and measures that criminalize undocumented migrants—many women become more vulnerable to exploitation, not less. This book gives a long overdue look into the real world of those labeled as trafficked.

About the Author: Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, PhD, is a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. She has received more than 100 invitations to share her work at universities, government and nongovernmental institutions throughout the US, Europe and Asia. Her research on women’s labor migration has been featured in various news media outlets including: The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Parreñas was a full professor at the University of California, Davis and Brown University. She is a leading expert in the Sociology of Intimacy and Women’s Labor and Migration.

More information can be found online at http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=9244

Filipina hostesses     Illicit Flirtations     Rhacel Parre as     sex trafficking     sex work     Sociology     women s migration     Yakuza