Shopping for a Wife Online
Inside the Mail Order Bride Industry - Part I
Angelic is 19. She's five feet two inches tall and weighs 99 pounds. She describes herself as "sensitive, sweet and family-oriented." Is that the kind of wife you want?
Chin Chin says she’s 25. She's five foot two and weighs 110 pounds. Her long straight black hair covers her tank top in her picture. She says she’s down to earth and dedicated and that she’s looking for a man – anyone, as long as he’s human.
Both Angelic and Chin Chin are from the Philippines and are looking for husbands. And for a small fee you can get both their mailing addresses from FilipinaHeart.Com.
Not all the girls are fresh out of high school. Emelda is 30 and looking for adventure. Samantha is 43, but the bare shoulders in her photo make her look younger.
The girls are a small sample. There are hundreds of Filipina girls available on the web. And while some of the services are a scam (or a front for porn), many will eventually arrange for you to marry the girl you select and then they will ship her to you – for a fee….
Judith Mirkinson put it this way in the Winter 97-98 edition of Earth Island Journal: "Entertainment girls, hospitality girls, prostitutes, mail-order brides and massage girls: They're all part of the globalization of the world's economy. Around the world, women and children are being sold for profit and shipped across borders, through one airport to another, sometimes overland - commodities in the multibillion dollar transnational sex-trafficking industry."
It is hard to tell from the website whether the girls at this particular site are just bait, victims of some scam designed to get stupid Western (of Japanese) men to eventually send money, or whether they are the beneficiaries of such a scam, or whether they're just nice girls who want to get to know (and perhaps marry) someone who can take them out of the poverty and political instability of the Philippines.
The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) sees these girls (and mail order brides in general) as victims of sex trafficking: "The business of bride trade or marriage matching is sex trafficking because it treats women as a commodity to be sold to foreign men. The purpose is not to find lifetime loving partners for women but to supply foreign men with a wife to be treated as a sex object, domestic worker and all-around slave."
CATW points out that the Commission on Filipino Overseas (CFO) of the Department of Foreign Affairs counseled 18,598 Filipino fiancées/spouses of foreign nationals in 1996. Over 90 percent were women, 70 percent had limited or no knowledge of the host country they were headed for, 62 percent were under 30 years old, and 42 percent were unemployed. (Those numbers have undoubted gotten worse over the last decade.)
In other words, 19-year old Angelic is going to leave the tropical climate of, most likely, Cebu City (population 500,000) for a sheep ranch 20 miles out of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales or for a farm near Hungry Horse Reservoir in Northwest Montana. After a brief conversation about how grateful she is to be out of the Philippines, her new partner in life will put her to work doing last week's dishes and tell her to be sure and be ready later for a very special evening.
Or perhaps she will find her new home is an apartment in Seoul, Korea, and finally learn that her new husband paid $2000 to a matchmaking service and is concerned about getting his money's worth. Few 19-year-old Filipina girls speak much Korean…
Read Getting a Good Wife Shipped to You
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