Woman of the Week: Mimi Chakarova

[redqueen]

http://womenintheworld.org/stories/entry/woman-of-the-week-mimi-chakarova

In 1990, Mimi Chakarova left her native Bulgaria at age 13, traveling with her mom to start a new life in the United States. Returning two years later, she found out she was one of the lucky ones. Many of her peers had traveled overseas to find work so they could send money home to support their impoverished families. Many were never heard from again.

“I thought it was highly unusual to not keep in touch with your family, that you would almost disappear in a foreign land,” she said. “People didn’t really know where their granddaughters were.”

Years later, in the mid-1990s, Chakarova spotted reports in newspapers detailing the growing sex industry largely stemming from Eastern Europe. Her thoughts flew back to Bulgaria, to the girls she had known growing up.

“I thought, how could this be? Could this have happened to some of the girls I grew up with?”

...

Another film I'm afraid to watch. But I applaud her for making it.

[seabeyond]

1. listening to blue collar comedy. these are suppose to be our family value men.

i listened to raw dog for a couple months, now listening to blue collar, after the tosh thing, so i could better understand what is out there. i generally listen to music, npr and laugh usa. real eye opener. i jump in the car last night to pick up son. there was an interview with a man that wrote a book about being lonely. (truckers i guess). the whole book is about getting and using (ya, use and use well) prostitutes. omg. lol. omg. my mouth hung open the whole ride to get my son. things. when men want to defend the use, as if these women have choice, or are "empowered" or are respected in any way, it is such bullshit. they are things. not people. not women. doing a job. but a thing. which i knew men feel this way. the only time i hear respect toward women int eh sex industry is in the defense of the industry. ALL other times, ugly. just plain ugly and contempt comes from the mens mouth.

i listened to how a man is suppose to use the prostitute. their right. there NEED to combat loneliness. just biological. they gutta. and that is what these women are for. the contempt to the women in dirty, dismissal, a thing. not a single consideration or thought to the woman, it is ALL about the man.

i listened to three men call in. ALL were suggesting not such a good idea. for differing reasons. prostitutes not really the answer. and the two doing the interview cut all threee down repeatedly and said what a huge ass thumbs up it was.

this is what people are listening to in the course of their day.

A lot of them don’t end up surviving. They can’t tell their stories. When you think about structuring something or putting together a global message for a global community, you have to think about what is the most realistic tone in telling the story and ending with something that feels almost like a -- I don’t want to say happy ending because it’s never a happy ending-- is unrealistic. This has been one of the criticisms for the film, that it’s a really heavy documentary. It is a very heavy documentary because of the subject matter. People’s lives are destroyed and it’s not easy to fix something that has been broken so many times.

I definitely don’t see myself doing this for the rest of my life because it changes you all the time. It sticks. If you spend two weeks thinking about trafficking and rape on a daily basis, even just researching and reading about it -- I’ve had interns who will say to me that, after two weeks of having to read through all these materials, they were having nightmares and were getting too affected. Now multiply that by ten years, and also being in the field, talking to people who have been in these places, and putting yourself in those places. You develop a fear that something terrible will happen to you, and you meet people constantly where terrible things have happened to them.

It affects you on a profound level. So if I were to continue in this area, I don’t know how much good I could do for people or for the work. I would like to expand on it, though, and add those other two really profitable elements, arms and drugs, and fill out the triangle. You can see that the key players are actually the same--the countries that benefit the most from the arms trade and the drugs trade and trafficking in women are all the same places, and the criminal networks are the same.

this is the thing redq. the more informed i become, the more aware i am, the more educated i make myself, it effects us. in RL, real time.

[redqueen]

2. It seems like an increasing backlash to the growing awareness of the way these things

contribute to women's inequality and violence against women.

What started out known as the Swedish model of dealing with prostitution spread to other countries and became known as the Nordic (or sometimes Scandinavian) model. Now it is spreading further. It is logical that as this effort to raise the status of women and give them equal earning power and opportunities continues, and as the effort to eliminate the idea that using women's bodies is 'natural', and that a large market for prostitutes is always going to exist due to consistent demand from sex buyers progresses, that this backlash will only grow more intense.

[CrispyQ]

3. I hadn't thought of this, but it makes perfect sense:

the countries that benefit the most from the arms trade and the drugs trade and trafficking in women are all the same places, and the criminal networks are the same.