Human Rights Reporting

Spring 2001 Student Work

Eighteen-year-old Internet mail-order bride seeks husband, age 20-99 -- A new booming Web business

By Katherine Cheng

Every year, more than 100,000 women advertise themselves for marriage on the Internet. And every year, up to 4,000 men find wives through these advertisements, according to estimates from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The Internet boom has revolutionized the old catalog-bride trade, creating a modern-age email-order bride industry. Like the old, the new links foreign women, desperate to flee dead-end lives with American men.

In 1995, there were 150 web portals devoted to the business. Now there are more than 400. The women, typically aged 18 to 30, put photos and translated mini-profiles on web sites, which often specialize in certain regions of the world. Men can log onto these sites and for a small fee, request addresses to write to the women.

Mila Glodiva counseled 30 mail-order bride couples when she served on the board of directors at the Asian Pacific Development Center, a mental health agency in the Rocky Mountain area. She published a book about the mail-order bride industry in 1995. Since then, she’s noticed some significant changes. “The women are getting younger and younger and the vehicle to engage in this industry has become truly global with the Internet,” she said.

The mail-order bride business first took off in the 1970s, dominated mostly by women from south-east Asia. Now the business includes a large number of women from the former Soviet Union, as well as a growing number from Latin American and Africa. All mail-order bride web pages appear to cater to American men -- they're written in English, and often include instructions on the procedures to bring foreign women into the United States.

In recent years, the mail-order bride industry has drawn publicity from a string of domestic abuse cases. In 1996, a computer technician, Timothy Blackwell was convicted of shooting to death his pregnant mail-order Filipino wife and two of her friends in a Seattle courthouse. In 1997, Donald A. Young, a lawyer and real estate agent in Pennsylvania, was charged with raping and imprisoning two Honduran women and abusing their children. He married at least one of the women after meeting her through an ad, and he may have also imprisoned Polish and Russian women. And last December, the body of Anastasia King, 20, a mail-order bride from the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, was found in a shallow grave near Marysville, Wash. King had complained to family and friends of sexual and physical assault inflicted by her husband, Indle King, Jr., who is now being investigated for her murder.

Prompted by such high-profile cases of abuse, the Senate Judiciary Committee commissioned the INS to study the industry, and in 1999, the agency released its report. It estimated that in 1998, over 200 mail-order bride agencies brought 4,000 to 6,000 women to the United States. Though the INS found no reliable statistics on the number of brides who later reported abuse, it recognized that the likelihood for domestic violence was heightened by language barriers, the brides’ lack of local relatives and friends, and the ignorance of immigration law. The INS was also concerned about the potential for women to abuse men as a way to illegally enter the United States.

To discourage marriage fraud, the INS has mandated that a citizen and alien must have met personally at least once in the last two years before a petition can be filed to bring a foreign fiancée over. Thus, most husbands seeking foreign brides must visit them in their home countries before applying for fiancée visas. After obtaining a visa and arriving in the United States, a couple must marry within 90 days, or the foreign fiancée has to leave. Today, the agency also requires the matchmaking businesses to provide its clients with the details of a battered spouse waiver -- a 1996 law that allows immigrant women to apply to remain in the United States, if they can prove they're victims of domestic violence. More than 11,000 women applied for the status between 1997 and 2000, and 6,576 were accepted. Businesses that fail to comply with the warning are subject to a civil penalty of up to $20,000 for each violation.

In her research on the mail-order bride industry, Mila Glodiva was most disturbed by the propensity for abuse in the marriages, and the fact that women were willing to take such big risks. "While most women deny it, the biggest push for them is economic. Coming to a first world country gives them a sense of hope for their future," she said.

In Russia, 6.5 million women are without jobs, and women's salaries are only 43 percent of men's salaries, according to a report from the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. Like the former Soviet Union, economic crisis, poverty, and high unemployment have hit women in the Philippines especially hard. Although the mail-order bride industry is officially banned in the country, hundreds of web pages feature women from the Philippines.

World Class Service is one such web page. The women posted here bear a common theme of desperation and hope. Joan, 17, from Lipa City writes, "My dream is to have a degree, but because life is hard here in the Philippines, I want to get married to an American guy who will give me a better life and family. I enjoy cooking and cleaning the house." Thirty-four-year-old Maria wants a 60-65 year old mate. She writes, "I am separated with my husband because he's unresponsible person and he had another girl and three years no communication and without support of my child." And Maria, 35, from Cebu City, writes, "I am interested to share my life with a man who is loving, caring, and understanding. The guy should support me financially."

Many of these women see the mail-order-bride business as a way out of dead-end lives, or as a means of quick cash. One suitor, Cecil, wrote on a chat room, "I have noticed that recently virtually every pen-pal that I write to has asked for money whereas in the past, it was rare when a filipina would ask for money. In the past, a girl had to be desperate to ask and she felt ashamed but now they ask without hesitation."

Some of the women are as young as thirteen and fourteen. Eighteen-year-old Yasmin Violeta is looking for a mate in the age range 20 to 99. She writes that she is studying and working at the same time because only her mother "supports our financial assistance." She says, "I like reading novels, playing some sports during leisure time, reading Valley High, Love Swept, and other love story novels, watching foreign films especially led by Jean Claude van Damme."

Of the 30 mail-order bride couples Glodiva encountered between 1986 and 1993, only two were very close in age, with four to six years differences. The 28 other couples had 20 to 50 year differences -- the women always being younger. The men, says Glodiva, "are dissatisfied with the women's liberation movement. They want women who will cater to them. They want subservient women."

The men who look for mail-order brides seek alternatives to American women. Steve Huff, 45, a computer specialist, had a hard time dating women in the United States. In the last five of six dates he went on, one woman turned out to have a boyfriend, and the other four left with other men before the evening was over. He turned to foreign dating services to find a better match. "All the women I have met have been wonderful," he said. "They are very gentle and very affectionate and very romantic. Womanly quite frankly. They are much more lady-like than most American women."

When asked why he was interested in foreign women, John F., who is married to a Russian wife, said, "Consider all the 'How many men does it take to screw in a lightbulb' type jokes you've heard, consider the attitude of persons who make these jokes. Consider the women who you are competing with to buy a pair of boxer shorts versus Eastern European women who take pride in being feminine. Now, come to your own conclusions."

The companies that engage in the industry encourage racial stereotypes, condemning American women while emphasizing the subservience of foreign women. “Since Marco Polo first came into contact with China and the Far East, western men have treasured the rare qualities of the women they met. In these women they found beauty, tenderness, and femininity. They found women who are faithful, who value home, family, and loyalty,” advertises the First Choice Club, a web page featuring women from Russia, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The owner of A World Class Service writes, "If my daughter wanted to be like Modern American Women, I would have no objection. I think many of them are splendid, honorable people, and I am pleased to have them as my friends. I just can't imagine why anyone would marry one."

Since 1996, A World Class Service has had over 600,000 hits. All the women featured on the page are asked to list their age, height, weight, whether they have children, and the age range they're looking for. Their addresses are priced at two to four dollars, depending on how long they've been posted. Other services, such as A Foreign Affair, which advertises itself as an "international introduction and tour service," offer package deals, complete with four-star accommodations, translators, and social gatherings for suitors interested in meeting women in their home countries. On these web sites, men are often instructed in wooing techniques, sample letters are provided, and sometimes for an extra charge, a man can actually pay a company to do the letter-writing for him.

Some countries, such as the Philippines, ban advertising of women for purposes of procuring marriages. But the owner of A Foreign Affair describes on his company's web page how he gets around the law, by having women in the Philippines circulate forms amongst each other to sign up for the service. "Unfortunately, I will never be able to run this business correctly, which would involve me going there to set up an office," he writes. "This is made impossible by the repressive Philippine government, which is thwarting the wishes of, and working against, its own people by outlawing these services."

The United States has no regulatory control over the industry, aside from its laws seeking to prevent fraudulent marriages and abuse. The issue has been presented at the United Nations, but no regulations have been passed. The counter-argument often arises that mail-order bride companies are nothing more than pen-pal clubs, and are advertised as such, and that arranged marriages, which are not so different from mail-order marriages, are still common in many countries. But opponents, like Glodiva, are quick to point out the modern day differences, “The old pen-pal exchange programs were meant for cultural exchange and do not have marriage as their real reason for letter-writing, which is so in the case of the mail-order industry,” she said. "And age old arranged marriages were usually of the same culture, and there is a sense of equality between the partners.”

Glodiva touches on the larger issue of the industry -- the imbalance between sending and receiving nations. The mail-order bride industry is sustained by the poverty and misery of women worldwide. The women engaging in the industry are searching for a better life. They come from places where jobs and educational opportunities are scarce, and wages are low, and they see the United States as a means of escape. They voluntarily post themselves on web pages, because they have little opportunity for advancement in their own country. And the industry thrives on this desperation -- oftentimes emphasizing the eagerness of women as a way to draw more suitors in. "From this day forward, remember that you are no longer in a 'seller’s market,' powerless to choose,” writes the owner of A World Class Affair. “You now have the ability to select from hundreds of suitable women. You can now speak to women from a position of strength."

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