A friend of mine, Sarah Matsushita, wrote an excellent article on women’s rights in Asia.
As Asia Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development points out, morality is “most commonly used against women, to control women’s bodies and sexuality”.
I thought about that as I was walking down O’Connell Street in Dublin last week and a man invited me to sign an anti-abortion petition.
There’s more in the article that’s well worth reading and contemplating.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Senate passed the reauthorisation bill for the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) by 78 votes to 22. The bill was championed by lead co-sponsors Senators Patrick Leahy and Michael Crapo. Since it was originally passed in 1994, more victims report domestic violence to the police and the rate of non-fatal intimate partner violence against women has decreased by 64%. According to the Huffington Post:
The bill authorizes $659 million over five years for VAWA programs. It also expands VAWA to include new protections for LGBT and Native American victims of domestic violence, to give more attention to sexual assault prevention and to help reduce a backlog in processing rape kits. Created in 1994, VAWA has helped to strengthen programs and services for victims of domestic violence, dating violence and stalking.
There were also some amendments, such as a provision which targets human trafficking and a provision (100 votes to 0) to ensure child victims of sex trafficking are eligible for grant assistance.
I’ve come across a blog called sexwork.ie, which is made by a company that advertises escort services in Ireland online. It offers an alternative view on the sex industry to that of Ruhama – I recommend reading the post titled ‘Denmark and Ireland‘.
In another post, the main argument made against the criminalisation of buying sex is that “all sorts of men purchase sex for all sorts of reasons including loneliness, lack of social skills, comfort seeking, curiosity, alcohol-taken and sex addiction,” and that criminalising them could adversely affect their mental health by making them fearful of criminal charges and contracting a sexually transmitted disease. This is point of view was expressed by a doctor, Dr. Derek Freedman, who appeared before an Irish government committee as an expert, though I find it strange that a doctor with a 40 year urinary practice would discuss mental healthcare as an expert.
Below is an excerpt from a dissertation, “Embracing the Demon: Monstrous Children in Japanese Literature and Cinema, 1946-2008,” written by Lindsay Nelson (with whom I collaborated in the aftermath of the 2011 disasters in northern Japan). It’s taken from the final section where Lindsay talks about new manga censorship initiatives and the idea of real (photographed) versus simulated (drawn) children.
Having moved through this lengthy and winding trajectory, what is next for the monstrous child character in the second decade of the twenty-first century? As I noted briefly in chapter 4, the completion of these chapters comes at a time when both real and imagined children are a constant presence in domestic and international media.
Specifically, two hypothetical child figures are at the center of a debate about censorship, free speech, and the question of what is healthy / harmful for young people. One group of hypothetical children are so-called “non-existent youths,” the children and adolescents depicted in manga. The other group are the “real” children who must be protected from images of young people engaging in certain kinds of sex in manga. Essentially, the battle over certain kinds of manga content and who should have access to them has become a battle to protect one imaginary child from another imaginary (monstrous?) child.
Mark McLelland writes:
In February 2010, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government proposed a bill to amend the ordinance targeting manga, animation and computer games and seeking to extend the range of the existing ordinance to explicitly cover depictions of ‘non-existent youth’ (hijitsuzai seishōnen), that is, purely fictional or imaginary characters who were, looked like or sounded like they were under the age of 18 and who were ‘recklessly’ depicted in a sexual manner that ‘positively affirms anti-social behavior.’ Officially known asBill 156, the ordinance was also referred to as the ‘Non-existent youth bill,’ especially by its opponents. (McLelland 3-4)
The bill was strongly opposed by manga publishers, who objected to its vague wording and to the idea of regulating the behavior of “non-existent youths,” which seemed a throwback to the era of the thought police. The first version of the bill was rejected in June 2010, but a revised version, which had slightly clearer language and referred to “non-existent youths” as “depicted youths,” passed in December 2010. It remains unclear how strict enforcement will be, but an initial group of censored manga has already been released. They include Okusama wa shogakusei, a work that was something of a poster child (pun intended) for the new law—it features a 12-year-old girl marrying a 24-year-old man and was censored for featuring child rape. But one censored work, Hanamizawa Q-taro Jisenshū Hana-Hiyori, was banned simply for featuring “sex in a school.”1 Already the criteria for material deemed “harmful to minors” seems arbitrary and confusing.
The language surrounding the bill has also been emotionally charged and at times seemed designed to inspire a child protection-related panic. Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara called those who would read material censored by the new bill “abnormal” and “perverts,” immediately relegating a fairly large volume of material and a large group of readers to the margins of society (Tabuchi). The law already in place to restrict the depiction of sexual material involving young people claims to restrict anything that might prove ‘harmful’ to the ‘healthy development of youth.’ Meetings and discussions leading to the drafting of the new bill also sought to “address the wholesome development of youth” by restricting the portrayal of “non-existent youth” in “anti-social sexual situations” (McLelland 5). Publishers objected to the bill’s vague terminology and argued that, for example, an “anti-social situation” could mean very different things to very different people. Some argued that the bill was just an attempt to increase surveillance in Japan as a whole, and that enforcing it would risk a return to an “oyaji (old codger) Japan,” with a small group of conservative older men attempting to legislate the morality of the nation (McLelland 5).
Censorship in the name of protecting children is, of course, nothing new. Beyond Lee Edelman’s writings on the ways in which adults are currently held hostage to the figure of the Child, in whose name all manner of restrictions are put into place, Walter Kendrick writes that pornography is regularly condemned in the name of the Young Person, the hypothetical pre-pubescent child who must be protected from temptation:
Today’s most popular Young Person, who governs the controversy over the Internet and television, is not a battered woman but a child. This creature…is of indefinite age and irrelevant sex; she or he is not so liable to be physically harmed by electronic pornography as to be led by it down some equally vague primrose path into unimaginable (at least, unimagined) degradation…As an object of pathos, hardly anyone can resist an endangered child, and real children should of course be protected from whatever dangers threaten them.But in the discourse of ‘pornography,’ we are not dealing with real children. Like the Young Person in all its other guises, ‘the child’ is a rhetorical figure, which lives in the realm of discourse and nowhere else. (262)
In its desire to limit children’s access to certain kinds of sexually explicit manga, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is also dealing with a rhetorical child, one “which lives in the realm of discourse and nowhere else.” It aims to protect that rhetorical child, whose “wholesome development” might be impeded by exposure to certain material, from another “non-existent” child—the child or adolescent engaging in “perverse” sex acts on the pages of manga. To prevent the rhetorical children of Japan from turning into monsters, they must be shielded from another kind of monstrous child—the sexualized child, who, by being made taboo, perverse, and “abnormal,” serves as a warning to the “real” children and their parents of what the “real” children could become.
Beyond physically abject, violent, vengeful, and optimized children, then, it seems that in 2012 we must also fear the specter of the hand-drawn child / adolescent engaging in certain kinds of “anti-social” sex acts, an imaginary child with the power to corrupt other hypothetical (but arguably real) youth. Given these developments, I would argue that the next step in this research project would be a survey of manga deemed “harmful to youth”—specifically, an analysis of the child characters portrayed in those manga and the ways in which they are determined to be a danger. Such an analysis would necessitate further research into the recent history of Bill 156, the arguments of its supporters and opponents, and finally a close look at some of the manga already singled out for censorship because of the actions of their child characters (or because of what happens to the child characters). As with my analysis of The Sky Crawlers, I would be curious to see how the anime / manga medium presents the viewer with a unique visual experience, and how the criteria for determining what is “harmful to minors” are ostensibly different in manga and, for example, photography and live-action films. An analysis of both titles that have already been singled out for censorship and other titles that may contain questionable content but have NOT been censored would provide some insight into the prevailing attitudes about what is considered “harmful” or “anti-social” behavior—in other words, what kinds of monsters (and monstrous children) are most feared.
On the show, there was a debate concerning the proposed legislation to criminalise the buying of sex in Ireland and an interview with an Irish woman who is a former sex worker.
“Being in prostitution and being threatened goes hand in hand… if they don’t threaten you and make you afraid… they’re not going to get what they want out of you.”
When asked how working as a prostitute made her feel, she said ” like a toilet, where men came in, emptied themselves and left.” She told herself it was okay for feel that way because she would go home to her partner (who lived off her earnings) and receive praise for earning more money.
The video is excellent and well worth watching, so please have a look.
The Hindu newspaper in India has reported that 4 people have been arrested in connection with a sex racket. Among the accused is Raju Mathew, a sub-inspector at the immigration wing of the Nedumbassery airport.
The group offered girls a job to travel to the Persian Gulf, paying Rs.25,000 (approx. US$455), and flew them out using fake passports.
According to the prosecution, the woman from Kazhakuttam in Thiruvananthapuram travelled on a fake passport and after reaching Dubai, landed in a sex racket network in the Gulf. She then returned to Mumbai using a forged passport.
The article states several times that this is a case of human trafficking, though it does not indicate that the women who were sent to the Gulf were coerced or under-age.
The Phuket Gazette has reported that four Thai nationals have been jailed for gross negligence resulting in death and breaking immigration laws in 2008 when 54 Myanmar nationals died from suffocation as they were being transported into Phuket.
Although the article states in the title and first paragraph that this was a human trafficking incident, it didn’t present any evidence nor cite any claims that this was actually the case.
Those who survived being crammed into the six meter by 2.2 meter box were immediately detained by police as illegal immigrants to be presented to court the next day.
All survivors were repatriated to Myanmar.
From what was said in the article, this looks more like a case of smuggling than human trafficking. The 121 people who’d been sealed inside the seafood container may have been complicit in the illegal activity, or they may not have been.
