Print
this page
Email
this page Newsletters - The Impact of Globalisation on Families and Communities
Philippines - Bride Trading
Bride-trading is the recruitment of brides through a third party. It used to be done through the mail but now is more often brokered over the Internet. In bride trading, women are advertised in catalogues for marriage.
One example is Diana. Age or size does not matter as long as he is a foreigner and will whisk her away from her fishing community in the southern part of the Philippines. “I’m looking for a foreign guy who will love me and help my family” she wrote on one of the many Internet marriage sites. She is aged 20 and is one of many Filipinas who have signed up to matchmaking sites seeking romance and more importantly a ticket to find a better life overseas.
It is estimated there are about 300,000-500,000 Filipinas who left the Philippines as mail-order brides of foreign nationals over the past ten years. With the advent of technology, contracting marriage through the Internet has never been so easy. Many websites offer catalogues of hundreds of Filipina prospective brides, some of them as young as 14, for a fee ranging from about US$2 to US$60. Most of these websites are based in the United States.
The global industry of mail-order brides is booming. While a small number of agencies offer introductions to women from countries like Russia, Denmark and other European countries, the majority of sites focus on women from Third World countries like the Philippines, and Filipinas outnumber prospective mail-order brides from any other country. The US Immigration and Naturalization Service, in a recent report, estimated that the number of marriages between Filipinas and American men through the Internet services had doubled in the past decade, now totalling 6,000 annually.
The practice of bride-trading may have existed in the Philippines since the 1950s but it was only after the Vietnam War that it has become a business. Some of the soldiers returned with Filipina wives and this encouraged their friends to look for brides from the Philippines. The cause of the phenomenon of the mail-order bride is part of the massive migration of Filipinos from conditions of poverty, unemployment and chronic political turmoil in their country. Under the Labour Export Policy of 1972, people became just another export commodity like sugar. The Philippine Government now depends heavily on the taxes and fees generated from migrant workers. This policy has resulted in the movement of over eight million Filipinos, the majority of them women, to 186 different countries worldwide.
In most cases, women are pushed overseas to provide livelihood for their families and escape from poverty. Many women view marriage as a much better situation than simply working as a domestic servant.
Although many mail-order marriages are successful, there are lots of marriages that are unhappy or even abusive, often as a result of language or culture barriers. Stories and reports of terror are widespread. Most of these brides are vulnerable to abuse - physical, emotional and psychological.
A form of trafficking
Bride-trading is also linked to trafficking, and used as a “legal” way to import women who are then forced into unpaid or underpaid domestic work, sweatshops or the sex trade. Some human traffickers recruit victims through direct offers of marriages, negotiating directly with the woman or her family for a promise of marriage, after which she is delivered to a brothel or sweatshop by the “husband” who is rewarded with a cash payment.
Bride-trading is also considered as sex trafficking as 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-round slave. The very process of allowing men to hand-pick their partners from a sea of faces and measurements is built on the commodification of women.
The mail-order bride is just a manifestation of the sex trade. There are lots of women who say they are happy in these marriages, but it is still nothing more than the buying and selling of women. Many of those who join online services in the hope of marrying into a life abroad end up as sex workers.
Aside from trafficking, women who enter mail-order marriages often experience abuse by the husband and his family. The very process of taking a woman from her community, transporting her to a new country and making her dependent on a foreign man (about whom she knows very little) in a foreign land makes her ripe for exploitation.
In addition, mail-order brides are often not given protection in their husband’s country. It represents a thinly veiled exploitation of poverty, with the power dynamics favouring the men from the start.
What is being done?
In 1990, the Philippine Government, alarmed at complaints that these agencies were luring women into the sex trade or forced domestic labour, enacted a law to ban mail-order bride services. This simply drove the mail-order business underground. The Internet seems to have bypassed this law and there is little enforcement by the authorities. Most websites are not located in the Philippines, so prosecution is impossible.
Another law, the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act was passed in 2003. This prohibits introducing or matching women to a foreign national for the purposes of sexual exploitation, forced labour or involuntary servitude. A permanent network of government agencies and non-government representatives has been set up to proactively implement this law and some Senators have passed a resolution to investigate its violations and to seek US government help in looking into the “dating websites” which show Filipinas.
Church response
Through the Migrant Workers Ministry, the issue of bride trading and trafficking is part of the concerns being shared with communities and congregations during information, educational and advocacy campaigns.
As well as fuller enforcement of the laws, more international co-operation is needed as bride trading is not just the issue of the country of origin but also of the countries which are receiving them.
Top
