Internet marriage brokers promise docile foreign brides, but the modern mail-order bride business carries risks

Some foreign women who met their American husbands through the Internet reject the term “mail-order bride” as disparaging, and many marriage broker Web sites claim they are not in the mail-order bride business.

But google “mail-order bride,” and dozens of sites displaying the images of thousands of women from around the world pop up.

Russia, Colombia, Thailand and the Philippines are particularly popular, though women from dozens of countries, most of them poor, are featured.

Between 20,000 and 30,000 women have entered the U.S. using an international marriage broker in the past five years, according to U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who authored legislation in 2005 to regulate the industry.

Some women’s advocacy groups say lack of industry regulation, combined with the methods used to market women have led to cases of domestic violence.

“You have a situation where women are being marketed as religious conservatives and virgin sex kittens at the same time,” said Layli Muro-Miller, director of the Tahirih Justice Center, a Virginia-based nonprofit that provides legal services to immigrant and refugee women.

Muro-Miller said about five years ago her organization began to see a pattern of abuse among foreign women who married Americans through Internet brokers. The women described “predatory, sadistic sexual abuse” at the hands of their husbands, she said. “It was clear that these women were the apparent fulfillment of a fantasy,” Muro-Miller said.

No one has documented whether so-called mail-order marriages experience a higher rate of domestic violence than other marriages. But Muro-Miller said a survey of legal-service groups around the country found that half of them were seeing cases of abused mail-order brides.

Advocates for domestic violence victims in New Mexico say they are also seeing cases of immigrant women caught in abusive marriages that were arranged by Internet brokers. “In New Mexico, this is occurring more and more,” said Claudia Medina, director of Enlace Comunitario, an Albuquerque-based group that aids immigrant victims of domestic violence.

Medina said her organization helped a young Honduran woman who had been imprisoned by a much older American husband in Edgewood. “It was very dramatic,” Medina said. “She literally escaped through an unlocked window.”

Medina said the woman chose not to press charges and returned to Honduras.
Melissa Ewer, a lawyer for Catholic Charities in Albuquerque who helps immigrant victims of domestic violence, says the majority of her non-Mexican clients met their husbands via the Internet.

A provision of immigration law protects foreign women from deportation if they leave abusive husbands. But immigrant women often don’t know that, Ewer said.

“The men will say, ‘If you ever leave me, you’re going to jail.’ These women weren’t born yesterday. They know that’s not right. But they become very confused. They’re isolated. They don’t know the laws here. They think, ‘Maybe I can leave him; maybe I can’t.’”

Until recently, women who used Internet brokers had no access to information about men they met on the Internet other than what the men volunteered.

Unlike other forms of Internet dating, a vast power differential in relationships arranged through international marriage brokers puts women at risk, Medina said.
“If someone from New York, say, meets someone from New Mexico (via the Internet), both people know the system, they know the laws, they know people in the country. You’re always taking a risk in romance, but both people are in the same boat,” she said.

Three high-profile cases in which mail-order brides from the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine were murdered by their husbands prompted Congress to attempt to regulate the industry.

In January, President Bush signed into law the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act. IMBRA requires men who use for-profit brokers to complete a questionnaire about their criminal and marital background and the broker to determine if the man is a registered sex offender.

Each questionnaire must be translated into the woman’s native language, and she must give permission to the agency before her address can be sold to that man.
Once a match is made, the State Department must alert the woman if her intended spouse has any history of domestic violence, child abuse or several other crimes during the visa interview.

Men are also prohibited from applying for more than one fiancée visa per year.
Marriage brokers have filed suit in Ohio and in Georgia claiming some aspects of IMBRA are unconstitutional. “It’s our opinion that the law may be overly broad and reaching into people’s privacy rights,” said Gary Bala, an immigration attorney in Pennsylvania. “It’s a chilling of free speech of American men.”

Bala, who arranges fiancée visas and advises men who tour Colombia seeking brides via the ilovelatins.com Web site, said the law is unnecessarily burdensome. “It puts on upon these romance companies the responsibility to gather extensive criminal background information on each gentleman,” he said.

While Bala acknowledges there have been “some horrific cases of men abusing women,” he said the new law is like “a sledge hammer going after a small problem.”
He also protests that sites such as Yahoo and match.com, whose main mission is not international marriage brokering, are excluded. “If we have a really bad guy, a domestic abuser, he would just (use) match.com,” Bala predicted.

Bala said the law presumes American men are abusers, while he takes the view that “American men make better marriage material compared to men from Latin countries and Russia, where a lot of the men are drunk and unemployed.”

Decisions are pending in the court cases, though the judge in the Ohio case, in ruling against a temporary restraining order against IMBRA, said the U.S. Constitution “never explicitly recognized a fundamental liberty in Americans meeting foreigners for intimate relationships.”

Muro-Miller said the new law is “ridiculously easy” for agencies to use. And she said despite the brokers’ claims to the contrary, her aim is not to regulate the marriage broker industry out of existence.

“The (agencies) serve a function,” Muro-Miller said. “I’m all for people meeting people all over the world. But they need to know what they’re getting into.”

Catholic Charity’s Ewer said the law might have helped one of her clients, a woman who met her husband through the Internet without knowing he had previously been convicted of child molestation.

After the woman emigrated and the couple married, the man molested one of the women’s sons, according to Ewer. “That was pre-IMBRA,” Ewer said. “She said that if she had known, she would never had married him.”

Contact Barbara Ferry at 995-3817 or bferry@sfnewmexican.com.


BY THE NUMBERS

• 35,000 Number of fiancee visas issued last year, up form 3,500 in 1987.
• 94 percent of U.S. men who are white who seek foreign bridges.
• 4 percent of foreign women who successfully find a mail-order spouse.
• .021 percentage of U.S. marriages in 1997 established through international correspondence.