Mail-order brides lie and memorize fantasy love stories to pass immigration
(last in a three-part series)
By Carmela Fonbuena, abs-cbnNEWS.com/Newsbreak | 09/22/2009 9:36 AM
Published on ABS-CBN News Online Beta (http://www.abs-cbnnews.com)
To join her husband in Korea, Aileen needed only a passport and a visa. Just a few days ago, she was married off to Ji-Wong, a Korean more than twice her age, only a day after she was picked among five women in a show-up tour arranged by a marriage broker.
To get a passport, she had to convince government officials that love for her husband was the only reason why she wanted to permanently settle in Korea.
Under the Department of Foreign Affairs Department Orders 28-94 and 11-97, Filipino spouses and other partners of foreign nationals are required to attend a guidance and counseling program—known as the Pre-Departure Orientation Seminar (PDOS), a prerequisite in the issuance of passports.
“PDOS is aimed to prepare Filipinos for the realities of cross-cultural marriages,” Regina Galias, head of the Commission on Filipino Overseas (CFO) Migrant Integration and Education Division, told Newsbreak.
The PDOS had been devolved from the CFO to St. Mary Euphrasia Foundation—Center for Overseas Workers and the People's Reform Inititiative for Social Mobilization Inc (PRISM). After completing the counseling seminar, CFO issues the guidance and counseling certificate that will allow the applicants to get their passports. Then they can apply for a visa. After getting their visa, they need to return to the CFO again to be registered before they exit the country.
PDOS has proven to be a big thorn in the throat of marriage brokers, allowing the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) to catch violators of Republic Act 6995 or the Anti-Mail-Order Bride Law and Republic Act 9208 or the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act.
Republic Act 6955 prohibits matching Filipino women for marriage to foreign nationals on mail-order basis or personal introduction. To go around the law, recruitment agencies take time to coach the brides on what to say during the counseling.
To get the PDOS certificate, Aileen could not reveal that she auditioned to become Ji-Wong’s wife and married him only a day after they met. She also could not say that Ji-Wong promised to send financial support to her family in the Philippines.
Aileen remembers her script. “They told me, if I go to the CFO for interview, I should change my answers. I should tell them I’ve known him for a long time. I was asked to memorize the marriage contract—the address and everything there. (Sinabihan nila ako, pag punta ka ng CFO, iinterviewhin ka. Ibahin mo. Sabihin mo sa kanila matagal mo na kilala. Kabisaduhin mo yung nasa marriage contract. Kung anong address mo. Lahat andyan sa marriage contract.)
A former PDOS counselor herself, Janet Ramos of the CFO anti-human trafficking task force said that some of the brides were very well rehearsed. The unknowing counselor may be easily fooled.
But experienced counselors are able to spot the tell-tale signs. The Guidance and Counseling Form, which spouses fill out before the PDOS, could give them away. The applicants may also slip during interviews.
The application form asks very specific questions on how and where they met their future spouse, if an agency was involved and if fees were collected, questions that can easily trip an uncoached applicant.
Below is a copy of the Guidance and Counseling Form.
How did you meet your present spouse?
( ) Place or work?
( ) Personal introduction
( ) pen-pal/phone pal referred by a relative/friend
( ) Pen-pal through periodicals/magazines/pen-pal column
( ) subscribed to pen-pal club
( ) thru marriage bureau
( ) thru internet
( ) thru other entities (e.g. Church groups)
*If Penpal Club/Marriage bureau/advertisement/Internet/Other Entities, pls specify.
Name of agency/web site _____________________
Address ___________________________________
Amount of fees collected _____________________
Answers in asterisk refer to violations of the anti-Mail Order Bride law
“The PDOS is like marital counseling. Normally, you would discuss about love and your responsibilities as a foreigner's spouse. It's easy to tell when the person is truly in love with the spouse. They can tell you about their first meeting, the first kiss, and even their sex lives,” Ramos said.
“Others just sound rehearsed. When you try another topic, they wouldn't be able to answer it anymore. Even when the questions are just basic,” Ramos added.
Counselor: Ano trabaho ng asawa mo?
Applicant: Salary man po.
Counselor: Ano yung salary man?
Applicant: Basta po may salary sya.
“Others don't even know their husband's surnames, where they live, and his phone number. It means they haven't really known each other that long. It doesn't really tell us that she is a mail order bride right away. It tells us that we need to spend more time on her,” Ramos said.
There are also the buzzwords that slip up during interviews---“manager,” “broker,” “show-up”, and “recruiter,” among others.
Sometimes, the family has to be called to the counseling session.
“We encounter cases where parents don't know about their daughter's marriage to foreign nationals. We witness their confrontations. Others parents are obviously in cahoots with the marriage brokers. They admit that they have been paid,” said Galias.
“They say, ‘Okay na po yun kesa naman nandito lang sa Pilipinas.’ We know their rights. It's a personal choice. But we have to make them understand the realities. What can happen to them? Even when the parents or the mail order bride say they are willing to risk it, our responsibilities don't stop there. We cannot just grant you the certificate if we still don't believe you are ready to settle abroad,” added Galias.
For denying spouses these certificates, CFO officials had been threatened many times. Cops had been brought to their office. They have been threatened with legal cases, too. Once, Galias and Ramos said they were accused of extorting P150,000 from an applicant.
It can get frustrating, they said. “We cannot help them if they don't want us to help them,” Galias said.
When they cannot get around the CFO, marriage brokers present fake certificates to the DFA to get the passports.
“It's been done. We were able to catch one,” said Ramos.
Reluctant from the beginning, Aileen got worried when she saw that they falsified her information in the marriage certificate. “I wondered why I needed to memorize my own address. I knew where I lived. When I looked at the marriage contract, it said I lived in San Juan. But I didn’t live there. Even Ji-Wong’s address was wrong,” said Aileen. (Sabi ko, bakit? Alam ko naman address ko. Yung address ko saka address ng koreano e pagtingin ko sa marriage contract, iba pala. San Juan daw. Hindi naman ako nakatira dun.)
“I got scared. If something happened to me in Korea, my relatives wouldn’t know how to help me (Nung nakita ko yung marriage contract ko na iba, sabi ko, nakakatakot to a. Naisip ko, kapag may nangyari sa akin sa ibang bansa, walang habol mga kamag-anak ko dito),” she added.
Regretting her decision to marry Ji-Wong, Aileen confessed to her counselors that she is a mail order bride. She was immediately referred to Ramos.
With the help of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), Aileen’s recruiters were arrested in an entrapment operation in May 2008.
CFO wanted to file trafficking cases against the recruiters for operating a show-up tour, a clear case of exploitation with the intent eventually to commit trafficking but the NBI downgraded it to a mail order bride case.
“There is no exploitation yet. She was able to escape before she was brought abroad and any exploitation was committed against her,” said agent Roland Demetria of the NBI’s Anti-Human Trafficking Division. But Demetria said they have a strong case against her recruiters for violating the anti-Mail Order Bride Law.
Aileen has been approached by the marriage brokers to settle the case. She told Newsbreak she has no plans to give up but her CFO handler, Ivy Miravales, is worried as the case continues to drag at the regional trial court.
Over a year since the case was filed, there have been three scheduled hearings on Aileen’s case. All of them have been postponed for various reasons. The suspects have yet to be arraigned. They are also trying to talk to Aileen to agree to settle the case.
To this day, Aileen’s case is the only case undergoing trial in Philippine courts on the Anti-Mail Order Bride Law and none against mail-order bride operators on RA 9208. Even as matching websites and “show up” tours continue to operate with impunity, the Philippines still has no known conviction under R.A. 6995.
As long as matching remains legal in other countries, it is almost impossible to get these web sites shut down. Laws governing cyberspace remain muddy. Local marriage brokers can use a web host based abroad and argue that Philippine laws do not cover them.
The women are not too willing to file cases against their brokers either. "If we are able to convince them, it’s also difficult to prove that a profit was made by marriage brokers unless you hold an entrapment operation," said Galias.
Getting Filipino mail order brides to understand their predicament and cooperate with the government to arrest their recruiters has proven to be an uphill battle for law enforcers.
“These are innocent girls. They don’t understand what they are putting themselves in. It’s not easy telling them how many mail order brides have been exploited. They thought they can get themselves out of poverty,” Galias said.
In the Philippine context, the mail order bride phenomenon cannot be discussed without touching on the Filipinos’ inclination to equate marrying a foreigner with economic salvation.
"Their desire for economic improvement at all costs leads to the erosion of values regarding marriage and family including the self worth of women. This is exacerbated by the colonial mentality among Filipinos which make them regard foreign lands as the center of golden opportunities," Renato Luz of the Stop Trafficking of Pilipinos (STOP) said.
Then and now, Filipino mail-order brides would try to convince CFO counselors that they are marrying for love. But in the counseling, they will often admit that it is pure and simple economics.
“When you ask them why they married the foreigners, they’d tell you they want to be able to send back money to their families. Most of them are breadwinners," Galias said.
Relationships expert Margie Holmes has words of caution for prospective mail-order brides. "Going to an agent who may not really know the girl and whose only business is to try to facilitate as many relationships as possible is not the way to go," said Holmes.
"Mutual respect is important in a marriage. I think the respect is lost if the man feels that all he has to do is give money and the woman will be his. The woman should not be too desperate. She should also look at his qualities first before she says yes," Holmes said.
Interracial marriages, no matter how long the man and the woman have known each other, are difficult as they already are, she added. The language barrier is usually the initial challenge but later on other racial, cultural and religious disparities becomes issues, too.
“There is always a big potential that our women are abused. The families of the brides are paid, too. That is why they are treated like commodities," she added.
Nevertheless, Holmes acknowledges that that there are happy stories. "The men may be genuinely lonely. Some may also have a friend who had a very happy relationship with a Filipina. I’m sure it’s possible that they fall in love when they come here. I mean most of us are very charming, attractive, and nice. It’s perfectly understandable that in addition to the more suspicious motives, there are actually ideal motives based on love, loneliness, wanting to have a good life and partner," Holmes said.
Understanding and capitalizing on the appeal of the Filipino woman is the main reason many local marriage brokers are able to lure many a hundred foreign men to small Philippine towns to look for future partners.
To the lucky couples, the money was well spent and the risks were worth it. "I think if your intention is right, you can find a good match," said Galias.
“Unfortunately, no matter what scary stories you hear, the story that you believe most is the story that you have personal knowledge of. No matter what stories are in the papers, or what you see on TV, but if you have a friend who’s very happy in a foreign marriage, you tend to believe that more. And it works vice versa. If you have a friend who had a very unpleasant experience that’s what you tend to believe more than the advertisements or whatever that you see in the papers," Holmes explained.
Reports on the success of mail order marriages in the US are varied. According to the 1997 report of the US Immigration and Naturalization Office, "marriages arranged through these services would appear to have a lower divorce rate than the nation as a whole, fully 80 percent of these marriages having lasted over the years."
The percentage was based on data provided by the agencies.
The Purple Rose Campaign paints a different picture. According to its web site, 70 percent of the mail order marriages involving Filipinas in the US resulted in divorce. – Carmela Fonbuena with Victoria Camille Tulad, Newsbreak
Disclaimer: This article was made possible with the generous support of the American people through the United States Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat trafficking in Persons and The Asia Foundation. The contents are the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Department of State of the United States or The Asia Foundation.
Showing posts with label Mail Order Brides. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mail Order Brides. Show all posts
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Out-Sourcing the Wife: Dreams turned Sour
Mail-order schemes used to traffic and abuse Filipino women
(second of three parts)
Carmela Fonbuena, Newsbreak | 09/17/2009 9:52 PM
Published on ABS-CBN News Online Beta (http://www.abs-cbnnews.com)
Ludy Omamen imagined a fairy tale wedding when she left the Philippines for Sweden in 1988 to join her pen pal of two years Nathaniel Hultmen. She stepped on foreign soil clutching a photo of a handsome 34-year-old fiancé who paid for the one-way plane ticket.
But instead of the man in the photo, a limping 69-year old man met her and introduced himself as her pen pal. She was 27 years old.
Not too long after she arrived in Hultmen’s home in Scaltura country—86 kilometers from Stockholm—Omamen met a neighbor who warned her that many women had been seen coming to the house only to disappear suddenly.
Omamen remembered hearing a woman crying on her first night there. The two decided to investigate while Hultmen was out to file a week-long leave from the factory where he was working.
"Behind a painting, on closer scrutiny, they discovered 14 jars all in one row each containing a preserved head of a woman. There is a fifteenth jar which was empty but above it has a photo of Ludy with her name and address," Renato Luz of the STOP Trafficking Office narrated in a 1990 hearing of the House committee on social services.
Five years later, the sensational murder of Filipino mail order bride Susana Remarata by her husband in 1995 stands for the deadly risks that Filipino women, married off to men they hardly know, face in a strange land.
After 18 months of correspondence by mail, US national Timothy Blackwell flew to the Philippines in March 1993 and stayed for six weeks to marry Remarata. It took another year for Remarata to be able join Blackwell in the US in February 1994.
After only 13 days of marriage, Remarata fled after Blackwell allegedly choked her and push her head into the sink.
To get back at her, Blackwell immediately filed for an annulment to make sure she gets deported back to the Philippines. But Remarata’s lawyers used the battered-wife clause to make sure she’d be allowed to stay in the US.
On March 2, 1995, Blackwell shot and killed Remarata inside the King County Courthouse shortly before the closing arguments on the annulment trial.
Omamen and Remarata’s stories were the most shocking of all the stories told of which there are many. Fortunately, Omamen was able to escape. According to Luz, Omamen went to the police and accompanied them to Hultmen’s house to verify the incident.
Her story inspired Republic Act 6995 or the Anti-Mail Order Bride Law of 1990—criminalizing businesses that match Filipino women to foreigners.
National embarrassment
During the 80s, the growing number of Filipino women leaving the country as "mail- order brides" was turning into a big national embarrassment. (See: Trends and patterns of marriage migration from the Philippines)
"Operated by unscrupulous and heartless individuals, the practice has not only cast shame on our women in the international community, but have also exposed thousands of impoverished Filipinas into further misery in the hands of their foreign spouses," then Pasay Rep. Lorna Vernao Yap, main sponsor of the House bill, told the plenary when she was seeking her colleagues vote for the bill.
She compared the mail-order business to prostitution where Filipino women are treated as "mere commodities to be packaged and mailed for the right price."
"I’d like to make it a point here that whether some are happy or some are not happy, it’s the entire practice that we are concerned about. They are treated like cattle. When you really come down to it, it’s like prostitution," she added.
Republic Act 6995 was signed into law in June 1990. It does not prohibit the inter-marriage between foreign nationals and Filipino women but it prohibits the practice of profiteering from match-making—including the practice of newspapers and magazines to publish columns of ads of foreigners seeking Filipino wives.
US-based Filipino group Purple Rose Campaign has long been lobbying to the US Congress to declare mail-order bride schemes as illegal in the US too. "US legislators of Philippine ancestry focus largely on whether the women should be called "mail-order brides," the agencies "mail-order agencies," for some other term which would effectively hide the fact that women are being sold," a group statement said.
The industry in the US prefers to call it "international correspondence service."
Gone underground
Two decades later, Omamen’s story and the law it inspired hardly helped in stopping Filipino women from allowing themselves—even praying—to be peddled as mail-order brides.
"The move simply drove the mail order business underground without significantly affecting the international trade," said Carmelita Nuqui, president of the Philippine Migrants’ Rights Watch (PMRW).
The controversial joke made in May 2009 by Hollywood actor Alec Baldwin on The Late Show with David Letterman underscored the failure of the law to stop the business.
"I’d love to have more kids. I think about getting a Filipino mail-order bride at this point, or a Russian one. I don’t care. I’m 51," he told Letterman in jest when asked if he wanted a big family.
Letterman replied, "Can you do that? Get one for me for later." And then the two burst into laughter.
Feminist groups worldwide assailed the actor for the "insensitive" joke. In the Philippines, Senator Ramon Revilla Jr., a former action movie star, threatened to beat Baldwin if he came to the Philippines. The Bureau of Immigration also blacklisted the actor.
While Baldwin later apologized for the joke, not all Internet users—Filipinos among them—sympathized with the Philippines.
"The fact is that a lot of Filipino women have sold themselves out as mail-order brides. Maybe the minister (referring to Revilla) should ask himself why so many women in his country want to leave it so badly that they’ll sell themselves to unattractive Westerners just to get away, because it still goes on," retorted "Embertine" in a comment to a story on the joke posted on Hollywood gossip site celebitchy.com.
"Mr. Bong, I would suggest that you Google that title "Filipina mail-order brides" and you will find hundreds of sites advertising the mail-order Filipinas. So the Filipinas don’t think it is "Illegal"!!," wrote "Dennis" in another comment posted on site abs-cbnNEWS.com.
In 2007, two years before Baldwin’s joke, Senator Manuel Villar had found the situation alarming that he sought for a Senate inquiry on the "non-implementation" R.A. 6995.
"An assessment and revisiting of our policies and laws must be conducted to protect our women," Villar said in the resolution. But an inquiry is yet to be convened.
Despite the world-wide phenomenon of the country exporting more wives than probably any country in the world, the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) only has three active cases against marriage brokers. Two of the Filipinas were married to Koreans. One was married to a Japanese.
“We have a number of suspected cases. They were recruited by the same people. We put them in the watch list. But only a number of them admit that they are mail-order brides and they don’t want to pursue cases,” Regina Galias, head of the CFO Migrant Integration and Education Division, told Newsbreak.
All Filipinos marrying foreign nationals go through the CFO for pre-departure orientation seminar (PDOS), a counseling session aimed to prepare Filipinos for the realities of cross-cultural challenges. But the procedure also enables the CFO to prevent trafficking and catch mail-order brides.
Trafficking Tool
The Philippine government joins feminist groups in expressing concern over the way the mail-order bride is being used to traffic women.
With its strategic responsibilities, the CFO is one of the key government agencies in the battle against human trafficking. Since the enactment of Republic Act 9208 or the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act in 2003 up to 2007, CFO's dedicated group Task Force against Human Trafficking has intercepted a total of 191 cases of violations.(See table.)
Strangely, CFO has not reported a single case of violation of Republic Act 6955 or the Anti-Mail Order Bride law of 1990 from 2003 to 2007. The three cases of Filipinas who were married to their spouses in 2007 were only intercepted in 2008 when they underwent the counseling sessions. Only one of these cases is undergoing trial.
There is no record on cases of violations of RA 6955 that were filed privately. There is no known conviction under R.A. 6995.
According to Philippine laws, the mail-order bride scheme is not considered a form of trafficking per se. Proof that there is exploitation is crucial for a case to fall under Republic Act 9208 or the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003.
The CFO asked the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to help them charge Aileen’s marriage brokers for violating R.A 6995 for profiteering out of her marriage and and RA 9208 for forcing her into the show up tours despite Aileen’s decision to abandon earlier plans to be married off. (See Out-Sourcing the Wife, Part 1)
But the NBI said it’s hard to prove exploitation because Aileen was able to escape. The NBI did not pursue the trafficking case, but held an entrapment operation against the marriage brokers.
The deterrent for the marriage broker operating the show-up tour where Aileen participated is diminished because the maximum sentence for traffickers under RA 9208 can be life imprisonment and only eight years under RA 6955.
Yet the mail order bride industry has been used for so long to traffic Filipinos outside the country, said Janet Ramos, head of the CFO’s anti-trafficking unit.
“The problem when they have left the country, it becomes very difficult for the government to help them even if they find ways to report the abuses to their families in the Philippines. That is why it's best if we can prevent them from leaving the country,” Ramos said.
Processing an average of 2,000 spouses every month, it's not easy spotting trafficking victims and mail order brides among groups of spouses when at the same time they are being prepared for the possible cultural shocks abroad.
“The mail-order brides can be well trained. Marriage brokers rehearse them on what to say. An unknowing counselor can be easily fooled,” said Ramos, who was a former counselor herself until the function was devolved from the CFO in 2005.
When does the crime on mail-order brides become trafficking?
"It becomes trafficking when, for instance, they are forced to become prostitutes abroad. Or she becomes a laborer. We learned about a case where the woman was made to work as a domestic helper. All her income was deposited in an account that the husband controlled. He didn’t have to work because the wife supported her," said Ramos.
Many of the mail-order brides find themselves working in bars. Ramos recalls an old case of a Filipina who married a foreigner in Australia who was sexually-exploited. “Everytime her husband leaves the house, she is rented out to other men.”
The Philippine experience shows that many Filipino mail order brides suffer various forms of abuses here and abroad. But when a woman has left the country, the help that the Philippine government can offer is limited.
In July, Social Welfare Secretary Esperanza Cabral raised concerns about sick foreigners marrying Filipino women to harvest their kidney. It was prompted by a Saudi national who went to the National Kidney Institute who wanted to schedule a kidney transplant. The donor was his new Filipino wife. Seeing through the scam, the NKI disapproved the application.
"We have partners in several countries. We send the counselors to the women who are abused or they call them. They guide them. ‘You stay home for now but do this tomorrow. If you have to leave home, go to this place,’" said Galias.
"We try our best. It’s not always easy to intervene into domestic problems," she added.
Since the trafficking law in 2003, CFO is yet to discover and develop a trafficking case against husbands of exploited mail-order brides.
The most recent documented case of trafficking involving a Filipino mail-order bride involves Lorelei Loseo, a Cebu-based 26-year-old mother of two who flew to the US in November 2002 to marry New Jersey resident Craig Staskewicz, 43.
According to a case profile by Gabriela, Loseo’s fiancé allegedly told her to help pay the bills by working in a local strip bar. Staskewicz also beat her, it said.
Loseo was able to escape her fiancé and then sought the help of a Filipino-American family, who gave her a room to temporarily stay in.
But when Staskewicz hunted her down, no help came anymore. "Staskewicz apparently parked outside of the strip club waiting for Lorelei. When she came out, he allegedly forced her in the car back to their apartment, where he repeatedly stabbed her to death with a hunting knife," the case profile said. (Newsbreak)
Next:
Out-Sourcing the Wife: The Chase (Conclusion)
Related story:
Part1: Outsourcing the wife
============
Disclaimer: This article was made possible with the generous support of the American people through the United States Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat trafficking in Persons and The Asia Foundation. The contents are the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Department of State of the United States or The Asia Foundation .
(second of three parts)
Carmela Fonbuena, Newsbreak | 09/17/2009 9:52 PM
Published on ABS-CBN News Online Beta (http://www.abs-cbnnews.com)
Ludy Omamen imagined a fairy tale wedding when she left the Philippines for Sweden in 1988 to join her pen pal of two years Nathaniel Hultmen. She stepped on foreign soil clutching a photo of a handsome 34-year-old fiancé who paid for the one-way plane ticket.
But instead of the man in the photo, a limping 69-year old man met her and introduced himself as her pen pal. She was 27 years old.
Not too long after she arrived in Hultmen’s home in Scaltura country—86 kilometers from Stockholm—Omamen met a neighbor who warned her that many women had been seen coming to the house only to disappear suddenly.
Omamen remembered hearing a woman crying on her first night there. The two decided to investigate while Hultmen was out to file a week-long leave from the factory where he was working.
"Behind a painting, on closer scrutiny, they discovered 14 jars all in one row each containing a preserved head of a woman. There is a fifteenth jar which was empty but above it has a photo of Ludy with her name and address," Renato Luz of the STOP Trafficking Office narrated in a 1990 hearing of the House committee on social services.
Five years later, the sensational murder of Filipino mail order bride Susana Remarata by her husband in 1995 stands for the deadly risks that Filipino women, married off to men they hardly know, face in a strange land.
After 18 months of correspondence by mail, US national Timothy Blackwell flew to the Philippines in March 1993 and stayed for six weeks to marry Remarata. It took another year for Remarata to be able join Blackwell in the US in February 1994.
After only 13 days of marriage, Remarata fled after Blackwell allegedly choked her and push her head into the sink.
To get back at her, Blackwell immediately filed for an annulment to make sure she gets deported back to the Philippines. But Remarata’s lawyers used the battered-wife clause to make sure she’d be allowed to stay in the US.
On March 2, 1995, Blackwell shot and killed Remarata inside the King County Courthouse shortly before the closing arguments on the annulment trial.
Omamen and Remarata’s stories were the most shocking of all the stories told of which there are many. Fortunately, Omamen was able to escape. According to Luz, Omamen went to the police and accompanied them to Hultmen’s house to verify the incident.
Her story inspired Republic Act 6995 or the Anti-Mail Order Bride Law of 1990—criminalizing businesses that match Filipino women to foreigners.
National embarrassment
During the 80s, the growing number of Filipino women leaving the country as "mail- order brides" was turning into a big national embarrassment. (See: Trends and patterns of marriage migration from the Philippines)
"Operated by unscrupulous and heartless individuals, the practice has not only cast shame on our women in the international community, but have also exposed thousands of impoverished Filipinas into further misery in the hands of their foreign spouses," then Pasay Rep. Lorna Vernao Yap, main sponsor of the House bill, told the plenary when she was seeking her colleagues vote for the bill.
She compared the mail-order business to prostitution where Filipino women are treated as "mere commodities to be packaged and mailed for the right price."
"I’d like to make it a point here that whether some are happy or some are not happy, it’s the entire practice that we are concerned about. They are treated like cattle. When you really come down to it, it’s like prostitution," she added.
Republic Act 6995 was signed into law in June 1990. It does not prohibit the inter-marriage between foreign nationals and Filipino women but it prohibits the practice of profiteering from match-making—including the practice of newspapers and magazines to publish columns of ads of foreigners seeking Filipino wives.
US-based Filipino group Purple Rose Campaign has long been lobbying to the US Congress to declare mail-order bride schemes as illegal in the US too. "US legislators of Philippine ancestry focus largely on whether the women should be called "mail-order brides," the agencies "mail-order agencies," for some other term which would effectively hide the fact that women are being sold," a group statement said.
The industry in the US prefers to call it "international correspondence service."
Gone underground
Two decades later, Omamen’s story and the law it inspired hardly helped in stopping Filipino women from allowing themselves—even praying—to be peddled as mail-order brides.
"The move simply drove the mail order business underground without significantly affecting the international trade," said Carmelita Nuqui, president of the Philippine Migrants’ Rights Watch (PMRW).
The controversial joke made in May 2009 by Hollywood actor Alec Baldwin on The Late Show with David Letterman underscored the failure of the law to stop the business.
"I’d love to have more kids. I think about getting a Filipino mail-order bride at this point, or a Russian one. I don’t care. I’m 51," he told Letterman in jest when asked if he wanted a big family.
Letterman replied, "Can you do that? Get one for me for later." And then the two burst into laughter.
Feminist groups worldwide assailed the actor for the "insensitive" joke. In the Philippines, Senator Ramon Revilla Jr., a former action movie star, threatened to beat Baldwin if he came to the Philippines. The Bureau of Immigration also blacklisted the actor.
While Baldwin later apologized for the joke, not all Internet users—Filipinos among them—sympathized with the Philippines.
"The fact is that a lot of Filipino women have sold themselves out as mail-order brides. Maybe the minister (referring to Revilla) should ask himself why so many women in his country want to leave it so badly that they’ll sell themselves to unattractive Westerners just to get away, because it still goes on," retorted "Embertine" in a comment to a story on the joke posted on Hollywood gossip site celebitchy.com.
"Mr. Bong, I would suggest that you Google that title "Filipina mail-order brides" and you will find hundreds of sites advertising the mail-order Filipinas. So the Filipinas don’t think it is "Illegal"!!," wrote "Dennis" in another comment posted on site abs-cbnNEWS.com.
In 2007, two years before Baldwin’s joke, Senator Manuel Villar had found the situation alarming that he sought for a Senate inquiry on the "non-implementation" R.A. 6995.
"An assessment and revisiting of our policies and laws must be conducted to protect our women," Villar said in the resolution. But an inquiry is yet to be convened.
Despite the world-wide phenomenon of the country exporting more wives than probably any country in the world, the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) only has three active cases against marriage brokers. Two of the Filipinas were married to Koreans. One was married to a Japanese.
“We have a number of suspected cases. They were recruited by the same people. We put them in the watch list. But only a number of them admit that they are mail-order brides and they don’t want to pursue cases,” Regina Galias, head of the CFO Migrant Integration and Education Division, told Newsbreak.
All Filipinos marrying foreign nationals go through the CFO for pre-departure orientation seminar (PDOS), a counseling session aimed to prepare Filipinos for the realities of cross-cultural challenges. But the procedure also enables the CFO to prevent trafficking and catch mail-order brides.
Trafficking Tool
The Philippine government joins feminist groups in expressing concern over the way the mail-order bride is being used to traffic women.
With its strategic responsibilities, the CFO is one of the key government agencies in the battle against human trafficking. Since the enactment of Republic Act 9208 or the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act in 2003 up to 2007, CFO's dedicated group Task Force against Human Trafficking has intercepted a total of 191 cases of violations.(See table.)
Strangely, CFO has not reported a single case of violation of Republic Act 6955 or the Anti-Mail Order Bride law of 1990 from 2003 to 2007. The three cases of Filipinas who were married to their spouses in 2007 were only intercepted in 2008 when they underwent the counseling sessions. Only one of these cases is undergoing trial.
There is no record on cases of violations of RA 6955 that were filed privately. There is no known conviction under R.A. 6995.
According to Philippine laws, the mail-order bride scheme is not considered a form of trafficking per se. Proof that there is exploitation is crucial for a case to fall under Republic Act 9208 or the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003.
The CFO asked the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to help them charge Aileen’s marriage brokers for violating R.A 6995 for profiteering out of her marriage and and RA 9208 for forcing her into the show up tours despite Aileen’s decision to abandon earlier plans to be married off. (See Out-Sourcing the Wife, Part 1)
But the NBI said it’s hard to prove exploitation because Aileen was able to escape. The NBI did not pursue the trafficking case, but held an entrapment operation against the marriage brokers.
The deterrent for the marriage broker operating the show-up tour where Aileen participated is diminished because the maximum sentence for traffickers under RA 9208 can be life imprisonment and only eight years under RA 6955.
Yet the mail order bride industry has been used for so long to traffic Filipinos outside the country, said Janet Ramos, head of the CFO’s anti-trafficking unit.
“The problem when they have left the country, it becomes very difficult for the government to help them even if they find ways to report the abuses to their families in the Philippines. That is why it's best if we can prevent them from leaving the country,” Ramos said.
Processing an average of 2,000 spouses every month, it's not easy spotting trafficking victims and mail order brides among groups of spouses when at the same time they are being prepared for the possible cultural shocks abroad.
“The mail-order brides can be well trained. Marriage brokers rehearse them on what to say. An unknowing counselor can be easily fooled,” said Ramos, who was a former counselor herself until the function was devolved from the CFO in 2005.
When does the crime on mail-order brides become trafficking?
"It becomes trafficking when, for instance, they are forced to become prostitutes abroad. Or she becomes a laborer. We learned about a case where the woman was made to work as a domestic helper. All her income was deposited in an account that the husband controlled. He didn’t have to work because the wife supported her," said Ramos.
Many of the mail-order brides find themselves working in bars. Ramos recalls an old case of a Filipina who married a foreigner in Australia who was sexually-exploited. “Everytime her husband leaves the house, she is rented out to other men.”
The Philippine experience shows that many Filipino mail order brides suffer various forms of abuses here and abroad. But when a woman has left the country, the help that the Philippine government can offer is limited.
In July, Social Welfare Secretary Esperanza Cabral raised concerns about sick foreigners marrying Filipino women to harvest their kidney. It was prompted by a Saudi national who went to the National Kidney Institute who wanted to schedule a kidney transplant. The donor was his new Filipino wife. Seeing through the scam, the NKI disapproved the application.
"We have partners in several countries. We send the counselors to the women who are abused or they call them. They guide them. ‘You stay home for now but do this tomorrow. If you have to leave home, go to this place,’" said Galias.
"We try our best. It’s not always easy to intervene into domestic problems," she added.
Since the trafficking law in 2003, CFO is yet to discover and develop a trafficking case against husbands of exploited mail-order brides.
The most recent documented case of trafficking involving a Filipino mail-order bride involves Lorelei Loseo, a Cebu-based 26-year-old mother of two who flew to the US in November 2002 to marry New Jersey resident Craig Staskewicz, 43.
According to a case profile by Gabriela, Loseo’s fiancé allegedly told her to help pay the bills by working in a local strip bar. Staskewicz also beat her, it said.
Loseo was able to escape her fiancé and then sought the help of a Filipino-American family, who gave her a room to temporarily stay in.
But when Staskewicz hunted her down, no help came anymore. "Staskewicz apparently parked outside of the strip club waiting for Lorelei. When she came out, he allegedly forced her in the car back to their apartment, where he repeatedly stabbed her to death with a hunting knife," the case profile said. (Newsbreak)
Next:
Out-Sourcing the Wife: The Chase (Conclusion)
Related story:
Part1: Outsourcing the wife
============
Disclaimer: This article was made possible with the generous support of the American people through the United States Department of State Office to Monitor and Combat trafficking in Persons and The Asia Foundation. The contents are the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Department of State of the United States or The Asia Foundation .
Friday, September 25, 2009
Out-Sourcing the Wife
Published on ABS-CBN News Online Beta (http://www.abs-cbnnews.com)
By Carmela Fonbuena, Newsbreak
with research assistance from
Victoria Camille Tulad, Newsbreak
09/14/2009 8:40 PM
(First of three parts)
With her slim build, long hair, fair skin and almond eyes, 20-year old Aileen, along with five other girls, sat before Mr. Ji-Wong and Mr. Soon, looking every bit like the fantasy woman Koreans are looking for in their future wives. But this is no ordinary search for a wife or a husband. The search had been outsourced to an international matching organization that brought together the interested parties for a fee and the complexities of love, chemistry, commitment reduced to a short, half-hour interview in a seedy hotel in Cubao, Quezon City.
The SHOW-UP
Aileen was chosen from a bevy of young girls who showed up in a hotel and was married off to a Korean, more than twice her age, the next day.
It was Lovi, a co-worker in a cheese stick factory in Fairview, Quezon City (Where is this factory?) who introduced 19-year old Aileen to Annie, a marriage broker.
As a single mother, Aileen was at her wits’ end trying to raise a son who was born out of wedlock from a rape committed by a former co-worker. Her weekly income of P700 at the cheese sticks factory was hardly enough for herself, much less for her son and her grandmother.
read more...
Inside the hotel, Aileen learned that Mr. Soon had already chosen Jenny after seeing her video in the internet. Aileen and the rest of the girls competed for Mr. Ji-Wong, who was 45, divorced and spoke very little English. As Mr. Soon proceeded to get to know Jenny, the rest of the girls were seated on a couch and were each asked to write their names and the color of their shirts on a sheet of paper. Aileen wrote “white” and “red” under her name.
Ji-Wong asked her, “How old are you? Where do you live? What is your name?” It was apparent he was smitten and with the help of Mr. Lee, who also doubled as translator, Ji-Wong focused his questions on her.
Aileen, who did not like the Korean and wishing not to be chosen, answered rudely. She told him she had a bad temper, that she was a bad cook and that she did not know how to take care of a husband. She also told him she had a son. “Don’t blame me if you suffer,” she warned him.
But the effort to steer his attention to the other girls back-fired. He found her tantrums charming and chose her in the end. After the other girls were whisked away, Aileen was immediately treated to a shopping spree by her recruiters. They bought her a wedding dress and a wedding ring.
The following day, she was wed. The wedding was witnessed by her grandmother, her uncle, her cousin, Mr. Lee and Annie, the Filipino counterpart in the mail-order bride syndicate who promised Ji-Wong an instant bride and a wedding that will transpire without a hitch.
Until Aileen turned on him and reported the incident to authorities, Ji-Wong thought he got exactly what he paid for.
Show-up Tours
"Mail order bride" was a term coined in the 19th century to refer to the way American soldiers literally ordered brides to join them in areas they were assigned. Today, it has acquired a different connotation as technological leaps and bounds have become easier for men to “order” their wives from the net in much the same way they do their shopping online.
Mail order sites, masquerading as nothing more than match-making agencies, generally use two ways to peddle women as mail order brides. They offer names and addresses of prospective brides for a fee or they arrange "show-up" tours where they can meet the women, select from them and bring home a bride in the two weeks vacation time their work usually allows them to.
As travel costs continue to go down, more and more foreign men seeking Filipina wives are lured to fly to the Philippines to join "show-up" tours arranged for a fee by marriage brokers.
The web site charges US $385 for a four-day "tour" in the Philippines. This amount does not include the airfare and accommodations.
One website checked out by Newsbreak www.charmingfilipinas.com [14] charges US$300 for a four day tour in the Philippines. This amount does not include the airfare, the accommodations and the booking fee of $85.
In the Philippines, mail-order bride syndicates charge each foreigner up to half a million pesos depending on how long he wants to stay in the Philippines and his preferred accommodations.
One- day Courtships
One web site in Digos City, a small city in Mindanao about two hours from Mindanao, for instance holds two show up tours every week. Another site in Cebu has a show tour once a week.
In these tours, the foreigners, alone or in groups, are booked for flights and billeted in hotels where prospective brides are paraded before them usually with a translator to guide them through the interviews and difficulties of language and cultural barriers.
The foreigners choose their bride and the new couple are usually married the following day. He stays for a few weeks of honeymoon and then goes back to his country while his bride takes care of the necessary documents to join him.
Newsbreak’s random survey of web sites organizing such tours shows a high demand for this kind of service both from men who want a bride in a snap and women who are eager for adventure and a chance to change their lives.
"You have a population which is accustomed to a non-materialistic way of life, raised with less of a value put on possessions. Many of the residents are lower income, but they still attend college locally, work and dress nicely in site of the financial challenges. They have old-fashioned values and generally offer sincere interest in the man, rather than his wallet and are overall low maintenance. Country girls who don’t believe in divorce, that pretty much describes the kind of girl you’ll find here," goes a locally operated mail order web site inviting those seeking for wives in Digos.
The web site tells the men not to worry about terrorists only the "insincere motives" of Manila girls.
But in many of the photos advertised in the website, the desire to be saved from their lives and financial ruin is still the basic drift.
At 55, "lonely" widow "Corazon" wants another shot at marriage. Catalogued as ID#1P10, Corazon’s profile says she’s 5’ 2" tall and 120 pounds. She says she loves gardening, cooking, and sewing clothes. She says she has no children and would want a lifetime friend to spend the rest of her life with.
"I would like to meet men who are sincere, honest, and loving ages 50 years old and above who are interested in communication, friendship, love and marriage. I will answer all letters," she wrote.
Single mother "merlitapiga," 38, who lives in Manila with her three daughters, is forthright in her profile in one matching web site.
"(Sic) I like to meet someone to love me and my partner for life, and help me to my financial problem. A good man and real and responsible," she wrote.
The wide age differences and discrepancies in the backgrounds of many couples married off through mail order bride schemes, particularly in the show-up tours, makes the motivations of all players suspicious, Regina Galias, head of the CFO Migrant Integration and Education Division told Newsbreak.
The Filipino mail order brides are mostly under 30 who have never been married. And yet too many of them agree to wed divorced men twice their age.
"Normally, men and women in marriages outside the mail order bride scheme are about the same age range," said Galias.
Other than age, Galias said the foreign men are more specific when they place orders to marriage brokers.
"Most of them set requirements. They want the brides with long hairs and morena. They want nurses or teachers,”says Galias.
Billion-Dollar industry
Judging by the proliferation of websites peddling Filipino women in the web, the local mail order bride industry could be worth billions.
In the past 20 years, over 300,000 Filipinos have been married to foreign nationals, figures from the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) show. The number grows every year from less than eight thousand in 1989 to over 20,000 in 2007. About 25 percent of these marriages were arranged by mail-order bride syndicates.
Majority of mail order brides come from Southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union. The number of women coming from the Philippines and Russia stand out compared to their neighbors.
A 1997 report on the mail order bride industry funded by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service cited Cherry Blossoms—the largest and oldest matching agency— back then as having over 6,000 women at any one time. Out of this number, 3,050 already came from the Philippines and 1,700 from Russia and Ukraine.
The Philippine Migrants’ Rights Watch puts the total number of Filipino women who have signed up in matching web sites to 100,000. The group’s survey of 200 web sites also showed that about 70 percent of the women listed as Southeast Asian women were Filipino. Filipinas who have been married to foreign nationals are spread out in over 20 countries but majority of them—three-fourths—are married to US nationals (nearly 150,000) and Japanese (100,000).
The statistics vary on how many of these spouses—mostly women—are mail order brides. According to the Philippine Migrants’ Rights Watch, there have been 55,000 in the US and Japan since 1986 to 2005.The US-based Purple Rose Campaign estimates that there are 5,000 mail-order brides going to the US and Japan annually.
Benefits
Assailed and demonized by feminist groups worldwide, founders of matching web sites proclaim the benefits of their services.
"Women who seek husbands across the world are like women who seek husbands across the street. If a woman is prepared to seek a good husband outside her own country, she is a smart shopper, availing herself of millions of choices," Fred Wahl, founder of the US-based Heart of Asia Romance Network, wrote in the web site.
"Using the Internet to widen your search beyond the borders of your own country is a Win-Win for both men and women. It gives you the chance to search a wider pool of prospective mates that you could hope to meet otherwise," he added.
Business is brisk as men of First World countries grow increasingly disappointed with their women who are not so willing to take on the traditional responsibilities of the household. The increasing tendency among First World women to seek higher education also makes the lower-educated men insecure.
These men look to Asian women as ideal wives because of their image as traditional, subservient and intellectually and sexually submissive.
"Women from the Philippines mostly seem to be very humble and do not feel as if the world lives for them and it’s hard to find a woman from the USA that way," said one subscriber of Wahl’s web site.
Filipino mail order bride Wenalyn couldn’t be happier, according to a comment she posted on the web site where she met her husband. "(Sic) I’m very thankful to the staff of Heart of Asia because your job is amazing, if without u I can’t find my soul mate. We got married J an. 2006. I arrived here at the US last April 2007. This is the first winter that I experience and first time to see snow. We plan after my US citizenship we visit to my family at the Philippines."
American national James says his mail order bride was God-sent. "I am thankful that with your service after visiting Cebu, Philippines, I received confirmation from God that Emerita was the woman made just for me. We were married here in Chesapeake, Virginia on September 9th of 2006. We are very happy with God's blessing," he says in the same web site.
In several cases, the Filipina mail order brides, once they are settled abroad, also link their friends and neighbors in the Philippines to their husband's friends. There are those who become full-fledged marriage brokers, too.
The prohibition of matching under Republic Act 6955 or the Anti-Mail Order Bride Law is actually unique to the Philippines. In the US, it is regulated and it is also legal in Japan, Korea, Australia and Canada.
Despite the happy stories of Filipinas ending up in happy marriages, however, authorities and agencies working to prevent the exploitation of women in mail-order situations declare that the potential for abuse is so great and the examples so many to justify the ban.
Janet Ramos, head of the CFO’s anti-trafficking unit, said the mail order bride industry has been used for so long to traffic Filipinos outside the country.
The problem when they have left the country is that it becomes very difficult to report the abuses to their families in the Philippines.
(Next part-- Dreams Turned Sour: Mail-order schemes used to traffic and abuse Filipino women
By Carmela Fonbuena, Newsbreak
with research assistance from
Victoria Camille Tulad, Newsbreak
09/14/2009 8:40 PM
(First of three parts)
With her slim build, long hair, fair skin and almond eyes, 20-year old Aileen, along with five other girls, sat before Mr. Ji-Wong and Mr. Soon, looking every bit like the fantasy woman Koreans are looking for in their future wives. But this is no ordinary search for a wife or a husband. The search had been outsourced to an international matching organization that brought together the interested parties for a fee and the complexities of love, chemistry, commitment reduced to a short, half-hour interview in a seedy hotel in Cubao, Quezon City.
The SHOW-UP
Aileen was chosen from a bevy of young girls who showed up in a hotel and was married off to a Korean, more than twice her age, the next day.
It was Lovi, a co-worker in a cheese stick factory in Fairview, Quezon City (Where is this factory?) who introduced 19-year old Aileen to Annie, a marriage broker.
As a single mother, Aileen was at her wits’ end trying to raise a son who was born out of wedlock from a rape committed by a former co-worker. Her weekly income of P700 at the cheese sticks factory was hardly enough for herself, much less for her son and her grandmother.
read more...
Inside the hotel, Aileen learned that Mr. Soon had already chosen Jenny after seeing her video in the internet. Aileen and the rest of the girls competed for Mr. Ji-Wong, who was 45, divorced and spoke very little English. As Mr. Soon proceeded to get to know Jenny, the rest of the girls were seated on a couch and were each asked to write their names and the color of their shirts on a sheet of paper. Aileen wrote “white” and “red” under her name.
Ji-Wong asked her, “How old are you? Where do you live? What is your name?” It was apparent he was smitten and with the help of Mr. Lee, who also doubled as translator, Ji-Wong focused his questions on her.
Aileen, who did not like the Korean and wishing not to be chosen, answered rudely. She told him she had a bad temper, that she was a bad cook and that she did not know how to take care of a husband. She also told him she had a son. “Don’t blame me if you suffer,” she warned him.
But the effort to steer his attention to the other girls back-fired. He found her tantrums charming and chose her in the end. After the other girls were whisked away, Aileen was immediately treated to a shopping spree by her recruiters. They bought her a wedding dress and a wedding ring.
The following day, she was wed. The wedding was witnessed by her grandmother, her uncle, her cousin, Mr. Lee and Annie, the Filipino counterpart in the mail-order bride syndicate who promised Ji-Wong an instant bride and a wedding that will transpire without a hitch.
Until Aileen turned on him and reported the incident to authorities, Ji-Wong thought he got exactly what he paid for.
Show-up Tours
"Mail order bride" was a term coined in the 19th century to refer to the way American soldiers literally ordered brides to join them in areas they were assigned. Today, it has acquired a different connotation as technological leaps and bounds have become easier for men to “order” their wives from the net in much the same way they do their shopping online.
Mail order sites, masquerading as nothing more than match-making agencies, generally use two ways to peddle women as mail order brides. They offer names and addresses of prospective brides for a fee or they arrange "show-up" tours where they can meet the women, select from them and bring home a bride in the two weeks vacation time their work usually allows them to.
As travel costs continue to go down, more and more foreign men seeking Filipina wives are lured to fly to the Philippines to join "show-up" tours arranged for a fee by marriage brokers.
The web site charges US $385 for a four-day "tour" in the Philippines. This amount does not include the airfare and accommodations.
One website checked out by Newsbreak www.charmingfilipinas.com [14] charges US$300 for a four day tour in the Philippines. This amount does not include the airfare, the accommodations and the booking fee of $85.
In the Philippines, mail-order bride syndicates charge each foreigner up to half a million pesos depending on how long he wants to stay in the Philippines and his preferred accommodations.
One- day Courtships
One web site in Digos City, a small city in Mindanao about two hours from Mindanao, for instance holds two show up tours every week. Another site in Cebu has a show tour once a week.
In these tours, the foreigners, alone or in groups, are booked for flights and billeted in hotels where prospective brides are paraded before them usually with a translator to guide them through the interviews and difficulties of language and cultural barriers.
The foreigners choose their bride and the new couple are usually married the following day. He stays for a few weeks of honeymoon and then goes back to his country while his bride takes care of the necessary documents to join him.
Newsbreak’s random survey of web sites organizing such tours shows a high demand for this kind of service both from men who want a bride in a snap and women who are eager for adventure and a chance to change their lives.
"You have a population which is accustomed to a non-materialistic way of life, raised with less of a value put on possessions. Many of the residents are lower income, but they still attend college locally, work and dress nicely in site of the financial challenges. They have old-fashioned values and generally offer sincere interest in the man, rather than his wallet and are overall low maintenance. Country girls who don’t believe in divorce, that pretty much describes the kind of girl you’ll find here," goes a locally operated mail order web site inviting those seeking for wives in Digos.
The web site tells the men not to worry about terrorists only the "insincere motives" of Manila girls.
But in many of the photos advertised in the website, the desire to be saved from their lives and financial ruin is still the basic drift.
At 55, "lonely" widow "Corazon" wants another shot at marriage. Catalogued as ID#1P10, Corazon’s profile says she’s 5’ 2" tall and 120 pounds. She says she loves gardening, cooking, and sewing clothes. She says she has no children and would want a lifetime friend to spend the rest of her life with.
"I would like to meet men who are sincere, honest, and loving ages 50 years old and above who are interested in communication, friendship, love and marriage. I will answer all letters," she wrote.
Single mother "merlitapiga," 38, who lives in Manila with her three daughters, is forthright in her profile in one matching web site.
"(Sic) I like to meet someone to love me and my partner for life, and help me to my financial problem. A good man and real and responsible," she wrote.
The wide age differences and discrepancies in the backgrounds of many couples married off through mail order bride schemes, particularly in the show-up tours, makes the motivations of all players suspicious, Regina Galias, head of the CFO Migrant Integration and Education Division told Newsbreak.
The Filipino mail order brides are mostly under 30 who have never been married. And yet too many of them agree to wed divorced men twice their age.
"Normally, men and women in marriages outside the mail order bride scheme are about the same age range," said Galias.
Other than age, Galias said the foreign men are more specific when they place orders to marriage brokers.
"Most of them set requirements. They want the brides with long hairs and morena. They want nurses or teachers,”says Galias.
Billion-Dollar industry
Judging by the proliferation of websites peddling Filipino women in the web, the local mail order bride industry could be worth billions.
In the past 20 years, over 300,000 Filipinos have been married to foreign nationals, figures from the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) show. The number grows every year from less than eight thousand in 1989 to over 20,000 in 2007. About 25 percent of these marriages were arranged by mail-order bride syndicates.
Majority of mail order brides come from Southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union. The number of women coming from the Philippines and Russia stand out compared to their neighbors.
A 1997 report on the mail order bride industry funded by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service cited Cherry Blossoms—the largest and oldest matching agency— back then as having over 6,000 women at any one time. Out of this number, 3,050 already came from the Philippines and 1,700 from Russia and Ukraine.
The Philippine Migrants’ Rights Watch puts the total number of Filipino women who have signed up in matching web sites to 100,000. The group’s survey of 200 web sites also showed that about 70 percent of the women listed as Southeast Asian women were Filipino. Filipinas who have been married to foreign nationals are spread out in over 20 countries but majority of them—three-fourths—are married to US nationals (nearly 150,000) and Japanese (100,000).
The statistics vary on how many of these spouses—mostly women—are mail order brides. According to the Philippine Migrants’ Rights Watch, there have been 55,000 in the US and Japan since 1986 to 2005.The US-based Purple Rose Campaign estimates that there are 5,000 mail-order brides going to the US and Japan annually.
Benefits
Assailed and demonized by feminist groups worldwide, founders of matching web sites proclaim the benefits of their services.
"Women who seek husbands across the world are like women who seek husbands across the street. If a woman is prepared to seek a good husband outside her own country, she is a smart shopper, availing herself of millions of choices," Fred Wahl, founder of the US-based Heart of Asia Romance Network, wrote in the web site.
"Using the Internet to widen your search beyond the borders of your own country is a Win-Win for both men and women. It gives you the chance to search a wider pool of prospective mates that you could hope to meet otherwise," he added.
Business is brisk as men of First World countries grow increasingly disappointed with their women who are not so willing to take on the traditional responsibilities of the household. The increasing tendency among First World women to seek higher education also makes the lower-educated men insecure.
These men look to Asian women as ideal wives because of their image as traditional, subservient and intellectually and sexually submissive.
"Women from the Philippines mostly seem to be very humble and do not feel as if the world lives for them and it’s hard to find a woman from the USA that way," said one subscriber of Wahl’s web site.
Filipino mail order bride Wenalyn couldn’t be happier, according to a comment she posted on the web site where she met her husband. "(Sic) I’m very thankful to the staff of Heart of Asia because your job is amazing, if without u I can’t find my soul mate. We got married J an. 2006. I arrived here at the US last April 2007. This is the first winter that I experience and first time to see snow. We plan after my US citizenship we visit to my family at the Philippines."
American national James says his mail order bride was God-sent. "I am thankful that with your service after visiting Cebu, Philippines, I received confirmation from God that Emerita was the woman made just for me. We were married here in Chesapeake, Virginia on September 9th of 2006. We are very happy with God's blessing," he says in the same web site.
In several cases, the Filipina mail order brides, once they are settled abroad, also link their friends and neighbors in the Philippines to their husband's friends. There are those who become full-fledged marriage brokers, too.
The prohibition of matching under Republic Act 6955 or the Anti-Mail Order Bride Law is actually unique to the Philippines. In the US, it is regulated and it is also legal in Japan, Korea, Australia and Canada.
Despite the happy stories of Filipinas ending up in happy marriages, however, authorities and agencies working to prevent the exploitation of women in mail-order situations declare that the potential for abuse is so great and the examples so many to justify the ban.
Janet Ramos, head of the CFO’s anti-trafficking unit, said the mail order bride industry has been used for so long to traffic Filipinos outside the country.
The problem when they have left the country is that it becomes very difficult to report the abuses to their families in the Philippines.
(Next part-- Dreams Turned Sour: Mail-order schemes used to traffic and abuse Filipino women
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