THERESE MARIE BABA-CHRISTENSEN
Therese Marie Christensen is a native of Barangay Singcang-Airport in Bacolod City. She has been residing in Denmark for almost 13 years now. She is a feminist and activist who professionally works in Denmark advocating for migrant women and their children to live a life free from violence. Therese received the DZMM TFC “Global Pinoy Award-Denmark” in 2018. A graduate Mass Communication of USLS, she pursued her Master of Arts studies in Culture Communication and Globalization from Aalborg University.
***
“Kvindernes kampdag” is international women’s day in Denmark. The most interesting thing about this is the word “kamp”, which means “fight” in English. Its literal translation is Women’s Fight Day.
International news normally places Denmark as one of the happiest places in the world. Some of the reasons include the standard of living and the level of gender equality. On the face of it, one might easily agree since we have female prime ministers and since women and their partners may receive paid maternity leave of up to 32 weeks between them.
However, my experience working with migrant women in Denmark, in which Filipinas are heavily represented, posed a huge dilemma. The migrant women that I worked with daily in my previous professional work were not afforded the same opportunities offered to the women ethnically born and raised in this country.
FIRST OF 2 PARTS
Danner, a women’s rights organization that runs a women’s shelter in Copenhagen and also spearheads several local and international projects, published a report, “Vold Mod Migrant Kvinder i Danmark 2012-2018” (“Violence Against Migrant Women in Denmark 2012-2018”). This report was based on a project that I was part of. The vulnerable group that I was focused on initially and heavily was the Filipino migrant community.
The reason for this was that Filipino nationals represent the biggest number of recipients of visas offered to Au Pairs in the country. Au Pairs are young women or men, age 18- 30, single, without children, who enter the country through a formal cultural exchange program. However, this has been highly criticized as a way to acquire cheap labor masked as cultural exchange. Although men are welcomed to be Au Pairs in Denmark, women represent the largest percentage of Au Pairs in the country. One could easily surmise that this work is typecast for women, especially when Danish host families are looking for help for, “childcare, cooking, and cleaning” via the Au Pair program.
Au Pair visas are temporary visas, and some Au Pairs eventually find their way to become Au Pairs in another European country, while many others become married and gain family reunification visas.
Filipinas are playing the game without knowing the rules have changed, and this has not been in their favor.
It was during an international women’s conference, “Women Deliver 2016” in Copenhagen that I met a female senator from the Philippines who talked about women empowerment in the Philippines. I joined in her session as it provided me an opportunity to share the precarity of the young Filipinas in Denmark. After her presentation, I approached her to talk about the struggles of the Filipino migrant women in the country. I was invited for a dinner meeting and was joined by the Philippine consul to Denmark at the time. I shared that there needs to be something done from the Philippine side if we want to empower and equip our young Filipino nationals coming to the country.
Topics such as consent, sexual boundaries and financial independence should be added when preparing Filipino nationals to enter Denmark, I reasoned. However, this is a different playing field than what we were brought up in. I shared the challenges I met when applying the empowerment approach. Among them, I highlighted insufficient knowledge about sexual education, financial autonomy, and consent.
These challenges were based on data I gathered from holding country-wide workshops. These workshops were meant to untangle the idea of tolerance, sacrifice, and debt of gratitude for some of those Filipina women who were either trapped with abusive host families or in an abusive marriage while breaking the taboo about violence and rape culture. Most young women tolerate the abuse because of the psychological power play inherent in many forms of domestic violence.
Additionally, the women commonly reasoned that what they experienced in Denmark was way better than what they would otherwise have had to face in the Philippines.
There have been several cases in my previous work wherein I, sometimes together with another person from the Filipino community, had to covertly pick up Filipina’s from their host families’ places or homes because of sexual harassment or domestic abuse. Often this would also lead to accompanying these women to women’s shelters and Danish police to report these cases-to act as a translator and support.
As an academic and through a researcher lens, it was interesting to dissect how the Filipino community in Denmark worked, and how they viewed the abuse. Some organizations were very supportive of these women speaking out, while others held their judgment in public but condemned the women privately, disgusted that they were tainting the image of what a good Filipina is in Denmark. Unfortunately, the women in some of these organizations are some of the leaders of the Filipino community.
Holding the training and workshops with these groups was the most gratifying, frustrating, and could sometimes be a painful experience in my professional life. I was conducting a workshop in 2018 on rape culture, as a side event for the March 8 celebration in Copenhagen. The workshop included participation by female leaders from Filipino organizations in Denmark but also individuals from Eastern Europe, Central, and East Asia, and Africa.
Rape survivors from the group suddenly stood up indignantly when one of the older Filipinas placed the blame on those who were raped. The older Filipina castigated Au Pairs in the news who were sexually assaulted, saying it could have been avoided if they were just wearing decent clothes and avoided going to bars on weekends. “They go to these bars on the weekend and get drunk.” “If they were my daughter, I would teach them to get respected”. I have seen this rhetoric so many times and it evoked so many emotions from me.
As a woman, this is just a reminder to me that gender does not often equate one’s stand-on equal access to the marginalized minority in the community, in this certain situation, women. As a professional, I feel that if we want real change and empowerment for vulnerable women we need to address our way of empowering in different areas.
One can raise awareness individually, but it is not enough. You have to also secure that social relations surrounding the individual are equipped with the right knowledge that can support the woman when she seeks help and in Denmark, the Filipino community is considered as an extended family where the older women are often related to as big sisters, aunts or mothers by the newcomers. Then comes the community wherein from my experience I would often combine, social relations and community when targeting my workshops.
Finally, the society where social policies are drafted and created and I knew then that this can only be done when the stories of the women are amplified in the media and academia as research studies.
In one of the meetings I had, I gathered ambassadors from different countries for a talk about how their offices or departments could help their nationals when subjected to violence. It was attended by ambassadors coming from Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. It was such an eye-opener for me to see that there is indeed a need for more knowledge on how to assist the migrant women in Denmark but also what are the different agencies that can help these women. – NWI (to be continued)
