Southeast Asia
Apr 8, 2008
Not all bliss for take-away Cambodian brides
By Brian McCartan
As Cambodia's once war-shattered, now booming economy opens to the
world, Cambodian women are leaving in droves as several international
marriage brokers have established match-making services in the
impoverished country. Operating in a shadowy legal space, questions
have been raised about the possible exploitative nature of the
business, which some contend has acted as a front for global human
trafficking rings.
Last week, the Cambodian government moved to put that trade on hold
while it investigates whether any of the international brokers have
ties to underworld crime syndicates. The Geneva-based International
Organization for Migration (IOM) had earlier drawn attention to the
trade and is scheduled to release next month an investigative re****t
on the growing numbers of South Korean men who come to Cambodia in
search of brides.
The mechanics of the trade are still murky. What is known is that
women from mostly rural areas are brought by brokers into the capital
city of Phnom Penh and put on display for prospective foreign grooms.
The brokers are usually either informal operators or connected to one
of several matchmaking businesses, which until now operated freely in
Cambodia.
Most of the women who contract with the matchmaking services are in
their teens or early 20s and usually from rural areas where they have
received basic, if any, schooling. The IOM's re****t says "the vast
majority of [Korean-Cambodian] marriages occur through an informal and
exploitative broker-arranged process".
The introductions are more transactional than romantic. Bride
selection often takes place in hotel restaurants where as many as 100
women, the IOM re****t claims, are lined up and put on display for
prospective grooms. After a woman is chosen, details are worked out
between the groom and bride-to-be and the broker.
A marriage is held after a few days, followed in some cases with a
short honeymoon. The groom then returns to his home country while
paperwork is processed for his new wife to follow. In 2007, the number
of foreign marriage licenses rose to 1,759, up from a mere 72 in 2004.
There were 160 foreign marriages registered in Cambodia in January of
this year.
South Koreans make up a large percentage of the men seeking brides in
Cambodia. In 2005, marriages to foreigners accounted for 14% of all
marriages in South Korea, up from 4% in 2000. According to the United
States 2007 Trafficking in Persons Re****t, 72% of South Korean men in
foreign marriages marry women from Southeast Asia or Mongolia. They
are often lured by billboards which dot the South Korean countryside,
advertising marriage services to foreigners.
Rural governments have even been known to subsidize marriage tours as
a way of dealing with growing rural depopulation. The South Korean
marriage brokering business began in the late 1990s, where it first
aimed to pair Korean farmers or physically handicapped men with ethnic
Koreans from China. The Korean Consumer Protection Board claims 2,000
to 3,000 marriage agencies now operate in South Korea.
Marriage tours also began in Vietnam and by 2007 the number of South
Korean marriages to Vietnamese women ranked second only to brides from
China. The search for foreign brides has been driven by low birth
rates and the growing difficulty South Korean men have finding brides
among the country's newly ambitious young females.
Many of the men coming on marriage tours to Cambodia have already
arranged contacts through online services, which usually host images
of eligible women on their websites. One such service is "Mr Cupid",
which offers Cambodian, Vietnamese, Vietnamese Muslim and Chinese
women. The agency, which has been operating since 1993 from Singa****e
and does not cater specifically to South Koreans, claims to customers
to "transform your life in six days!"
Its operations were expanded beyond Vietnam to Cambodia and China in
2000 and Mr Cupid's website also offers franchise services. The
website claims, "Come to Cambodia today and we guarantee that your
visit will be fruitful, you will find the lady of your dreams waiting
for you right there." From services like this, or those based in South
Korea, men can arrange four- to six-day marriage tours.
Match made in hell
In many ways such services are false advertising. Marriages between
Cambodian women and South Korean men are known to be fraught with
difficulties, frequently caused by huge cultural and linguistic
divides. "Often the women have misguided expectations of what life may
be like abroad; there is a lack of realistic information about life in
Korea," the IOM's re****t says.
Indeed, most of the women's fantasies of what their new lives will be
like are based on Korean movies and television shows that have
recently gained popularity in Cambodia and other parts of Asia. The
new Cambodian brides often expect their South Korean grooms to be
rich, successful businessmen; the reality, however, as the IOM re****t
explains, is that they are often poor and poorly educated. This
impacts the women's hopes that through marriage they would be able to
send money home to sup****t their families.
The pressures often result in disappointment and physical abuse. The
deaths of several Vietnamese wives in South Korea in 2007 and early
2008 due to mistreatment by their South Korean husbands have already
raised hard questions about the trade in Vietnam. One case that made
headlines in both Vietnam and Cambodia involved the death of Tran
Thanh Lan, a purchased bride who jumped or fell from her 14th floor
balcony after only six weeks of marriage in South Korea. Her mother
recently went to the country to demand an inquiry into her daughter's
death.
Because the business apparently lacks a coercive element - women are
allowed to turn down a marriage offer - it is not technically
considered human trafficking. The business side of the trade, however,
is certainly exploitative. Potential grooms pay as much as US$20,000
to brokers for their services, while the bride's family is given
$1,000 as well as money to cover the costs of the wedding. The broker
and agency divvy up the rest of the spoils.
The IOM re****t indicates that while there have been cases of abuse and
domestic violence, "human trafficking has been far more difficult to
identify". This may be the case in Cambodia so far, but there is
plenty of do***entation of Vietnamese women tricked by marriage
brokers into factory work in South Korea. On February 26, police in
Busan, South Korea, arrested a Vietnamese woman under suspicion of
arranging sham marriages for $10,000 each. Once the purchased brides
receive Korean citizen****p, the women were divorced from their
husbands and forced to work in factories.
Abuse against Cambodian brides has also been re****ted and some have
ended up running away from bad marriages. The 2007 US Trafficking in
Persons Re****t said, "NGOs [non-governmental organizations] are
re****ting cases of foreign women placed in conditions of commercial
***ual exploitation or forced labor by fake 'husbands' who work for
trafficking rings or exploitative husbands who feel they 'own' the
woman and can use her as a farm hand or domestic worker."
After recent crackdowns on the trade by Vietnamese authorities, the
marriage brokering industry has grown rapidly in Cambodia, leading
some trafficking experts to conclude that the brokers and trafficking
rings have simply ****fted countries. Marriage brokering is now illegal
in Vietnam, but at its peak 20,000 brides were leaving the country
every year.
Current Vietnamese law allows only the establishment of marriage
sup****t centers by non-profit women's groups. The Vietnamese Ministry
of Justice has recently recommended legalizing the service in order to
place stricter controls on it. The police, however, have recommended
raising penalties, making the offering of Vietnamese women as brides
on a par with human trafficking.
The Cambodian government first publicly acknowledged a potential
problem in March. Sar Keng, deputy prime minister and minister of
interior, said at the launch of a national anti-trafficking awareness
campaign that some cases of human trafficking had been identified in
the Cambodia marriage industry. Prime Minister Hun Sen has since
ordered a crackdown on the industry, including cancelation of the
licenses two South Korean companies engaged in the trade.
Brian McCartan is a Thailand-based freelance journalist.
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