Mail Order Brides

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someone asked who sell the women. some sell themselves, some are sold by family, some are kidnapped

someone asked who sell the women. some sell themselves, some are sold by family, some are kidnapped

This should never be illegal if everyone is fully on-board at any stage. What people do with their own bodies is none of anyone else's business..

This should never be illegal if everyone is fully on-board at any stage. What people do with their own bodies is none of anyone else's business.

The other two are of course abhorrent.

Its make on difference its still illegal, bonded labour (debt bondage) is a form of slavery.

blahblah123, you are incorrect. quite often the female does not have a choice. international agencies are aware of this fact but struggle to sort out which are entering into it willingly. and anyway even if she has a choice she is still being bought and sold.

EDIT: to clarify, when a person buys a prostitute... the hooker may have consented to the act in some cases, but that doesn't mean that her services were not purchased. her sexual services were bought and sold.

with mail order brides, the difference is that the human is purchased wholesale. yes, the human can be returned and the human can leave, but it doesn't make it any less of a business transaction where a person was bought & sold.

Many of these women are escaping bad circumstance, and have just as good a chance being set up with a violent man in their own country, those are the cards she was dealt in life.. and that's just the reality of it.

You're paying the agency to find you a wife, not to "buy" her. Just like your paying a dating site (like eHarmony) to find you a partner.

And I'm just curious, if a rich american man marries a poor american women, is he "buying" her? According to you, he is because she can't leave - she relies on him for food, shelter, etc.

edit:
@MagicToeNail: I can see how it can be seen as demeaning, and I'm sure it attracts many creeps. But I think the good way to weed them out is to deny anyone with a significant criminal record. And also, some people are just lonely and can't find anyone else. It's not all about finding someone submissive.

Indeed. Perhaps some of the radical feminists so against it would like to meet someone who found their partner through these websites and are extremely happily married? Perhaps they would rather consign women like that to their miserable lives they left behind because apparently it's "exploitative" or some other guff.

You're paying the agency to find you a wife, not to "buy" her. Just like your paying a dating site (like eHarmony) to find you a partner.

And I'm just curious, if a rich american man marries a poor american women, is he "buying" her? According to you, he is because she can't leave - she relies on him for food, shelter, etc.

Women who use the services of these agencies usually live in fairly well developed countries, such as Eastern European nations.

Another important feature of the mail-order bride business is its relationship and inseparability from the sex tourism business. While proponents of bride trafficking claim that pornography and sex tourism are completely unrelated businesses, the marketing of complete services on the mail-order bride web sites tell a different story. Most companies that offer mail-order bride services also offer sex tours of third world countries (Plasencia). The Internet enables interconnectivity between the exploitation of minors internationally, positioning women and children both as potential brides and also as escorts while men tour third world countries buying sex whether the intention is to purchase a permanent woman or not.

Traffickers rely on the vulnerable, and taking a woman out of her community, transporting her from her country, and making her dependent on a foreign man in a foreign land makes her ripe for exploitation. Many women in less developed countries long for a move to a more developed country where life is thought to be easier. One way ‘‘out’’ for women in economically depressed communities is to marry citizens of more developed countries. And where governments offer no civil protections, this option leaves women with little information about their prospective marriage matches and whether they have been married before, have criminal records, etc.

Traffickers are documented to have used offers of marriage to recruit women for the sex trade and for forced labor. From rural villages in Asia to slums in major South American cities, women are deceived into leaving their homes and traveling across international borders in the hopes of marrying men who can provide them better lives. This vulnerability of disadvantaged women is well known to traffickers.

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 a sweatshop by the ‘‘husband,’’ who is rewarded with a cash payment from the brothel keeper or sweatshop manager for the delivery of his slave.

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While some matchmaking organizations take a personal approach to their business, the vast majority of mail order bride matches now happen through the mediation of Internet-based matchmaking organizations where connections occur in bulk, catalogs contain hundreds or thousands of profiles of available brides, and where matchmakers rarely have personal clients.

Here is an interesting point. With the spread of the Internet, anyone with a Web connection can now run a matchmaking business. The industry has ballooned greatly in recent years and hasbecome very commercial. Many on-line mail order bride Web sites have taken a pure merchandising approach to their matchmaking, one with which any of us who go onto a catalog, a book site are familiar with. Just as we find buttons that say ‘‘browse,’’ ‘‘select,’’ ‘‘proceed to checkout,’’ these same setups are visible on matchmaking organizations.

In the written testimony provided to the committee, as well on the table, we have provided an illustration of what one such Web site, Alena Russian Bride Marriage Agency, looks like. You have a shopping cart. Your order list. An instruction to ‘‘preview your order list with photos.’’ Another icon tells you to ‘‘proceed to checkout.’’

Underneath this are the words, ‘‘Search our catalog to find your future Russian wife. 100 percent satisfaction guaranty or money back. No questions.’’ With the reduction of women to such a commodity very little different from a sweater, a sweatshirt, or a car part that I would buy, it is no wonder that the attitude that continues in a relationship continues to be one of ownership.

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So it is not surprising that the industry of marriage should become a vehicle for exploitation. Nor is it surprising that the Internet, because of its immediacy, promises of anonymity and lack of accountability, should become the vehicle of choice for this exploitation to take place.

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Several Sites advertise themselves as warehouses.

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As the mail-order bride industry is first and foremost a business, the customer’s satisfaction is logically the central concern. Because the paying clients are male, the bride is reduced to the condition of commodity. Protective mechanisms exist to safeguard the potential husbands, but not the potential brides. The mail-order brides face conditions of vulnerability prior to marriage with their potential grooms, during the matchmaking process, and after the marriage takes place.

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In countries where recruitment of women by marriage agencies is popular, the general public does not understand the risk of signing up with these agencies. A NGO worker in St. Petersburg said that her mother was urging her to sign up. She said her mother said, ‘‘Why waste your time with that work. Why not correspond with a Western man and find a better life?’’ She said she knew of cases in which women are afraid to go to the agencies alone, so mothers accompany their daughters to sign them up.

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There is an abundance of evidence that marriage agencies are involved in activities that result in the sexual exploitation of women and children.