Despite a law banning mail-order marriages about 300,000 to half a million Filipino mail-order brides continue to leave the country each year and Senate President Manuel Villar wants this investigated.
Villar said Republic Act 6955 of 1990 “declare(s) as unlawful the practice of matching Filipino women for marriage to foreign nationals on a mail order basis and other similar practices, including the advertisement, publication, printing or distribution of brochures, fliers, and other propaganda materials in furtherance thereof and providing penalty therefore.”
“The government must implement the law prohibiting the violation of Filipino women, and should look after distressed Filipinas who have suffered abuses in the hands of foreign spouses,” he stressed.
Source : 500,000 Filipino mail-order brides worry Villar
Even the websites promoting mail-order matches will be investigated. Police powers will be needed here in order to enforce the ban as most of these websites are based outside the Philippines. I am sure the webhosting companies will close these sites if there is some court order. It’s high time the governement start working on the implementation of the Republic Act 6955 of 1990. Even the Google Adwords Publishers can be informed to stop the advertising of these websites.
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September 23rd, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Are you planning to shut down all the social networking sites where these ladies find men, including places like yahoo messenger and myspace? If your goal is to stop marriages between western men and Filipinas that meet over the internet you might as well forget it. Globalization is here and you cannot stop it.
These ladies choose to find love abroad because the Philippines has too few opportunities for people to make a decent living. The well educated are leaving just as fast as the uneducated. Also, single ladies with children are leaving because western men are more willing to accept their children, where most Filipino men reject single mothers.
Who is responsible for the outward migration? The politicians, from your President all the way down to the local officials, just need to look in the mirror for the answer. Until the Philippine government decides that it’s people are more important than the money they stuff in their own pockets Filipinas will continue to go abroad.
The good news is that in western countries women have far more protections than in the Philippines. Domestic violence laws are a lot stronger, and women have more legal rights. Sorry, but this is the truth. Yes, there are a few terrible things that have happened to Filipinas that have entered into marriages abroad. But the incidents (while played over and over in the media) are few and no more likely than a Filipina being abused by her Filipino husband.
Do you want to save Filipinas from wide spread abuse? Tell your government to stop allowing women to be sold as slaves “entertainers” in places like Japan and South Korea. There you have a HUGE problem. Also, stop the horrible abuses Filipinas face when being hired as nannies in the Middle East. Middle Eastern women already have no rights, so how many rights do you think a Filipina nanny has in Saudi Arabia? ZERO.
The Philippines government has turned a blind eye to what is happening to these ladies, and of course they know what is happening. These countires are exploiting Filipinas for their own entertainment, treating them like property.
Do not let the media sound bites of “mail order brides” make you lose focus on real ways you can help Filipinas.
September 27th, 2007 at 2:43 am
These ladies choose to find love abroad because the Philippines has too few opportunities for people to make a decent living. The well educated are leaving just as fast as the uneducated. Also, single ladies with children are leaving because western men are more willing to accept their children, where most Filipino men reject single mothers……….
Do you want to save Filipinas from wide spread abuse? Tell your government to stop allowing women to be sold as slaves “entertainers” in places like Japan and South Korea. There you have a HUGE problem. Also, stop the horrible abuses Filipinas face when being hired as nannies in the Middle East. Middle Eastern women already have no rights, so how many rights do you think a Filipina nanny has in Saudi Arabia? ZERO.
These countires are exploiting Filipinas for their own entertainment, treating them like property.
September 29th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
The ladies do not exactly choose to “find love abroad.” They want bread. There is no “love” when ugly white old American males display their resources to economically-deprived girls less than half their age.
The mail-order bride dynamic is a legacy of US imperialism and post-imperialism toward many Third World countries. Make the Philippines and other resource rich nations subservient to the transnational profiteers, compromising any efforts to more egalitarian policies (witness how angry US imperialists get with neo-socialist governments like Venezuela’s and such).
The goal of US policy makers is to make nations like the Philippines dumb, poor but subservient, in other words. Indeed, the words of “freedom and democracy” are served as global reverse-psychology all the while the USA reems the world with military bases, CIA subversion and “Shock and Awe” bombardments.
The nice by-product in all this is when there are millions of destitute Filipino (and other Third World) women to serve as entertainment and commodities for the American men who can no longer put American women in their places (like the kitchen).
Women of color worldwide in general are not protected because American servicemen bombard sovereign countries and rape women in host countries.
-Nicaraguan women had no real rights when the USA funded Contra terrorists.
-El Salvadoran women had no real rights when the USA trained Atlacatl Battalions to slaughter their villages.
-Vietnamese women had no real rights when the USA carpet-bombed and “strategically hamleted” their country.
-Panamanian women had no real rights when US B-2 bombers blasted the town of El Chorillo in 1989 killing many hundreds.
-Iraqi women have no rights when they are raped and mutilated by US troops.
-Okinawan women have no real rights when they are raped and murdered by US troops.
White Americans are supposed to be the saviors or something?
You see, Filipinas brought into the United States are not really protected. More so than what the media portray. They are abused and raped by these American men with gender-equality issues.
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1390/context/archive
“Some foreign women, like Fox, are finding that their American dreamboats turn into nightmares after marriage. One Russian woman, Svetlana, used a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal from her ex-husband. Svetlana nervously recounted how her husband repeatedly raped, beat and choked her during their 10-month marriage. When she turned to the marriage broker for help, they told her: “‘It’s just a different culture,’” Svetlana claimed.
“I didn’t know. Is this normal marriage? My father, he never shook the shoulders of my mom, or choked her, or hit my mother’s head against the wall,” she said during an interview in the unmarked, secure offices of Tahirih.
Miller-Muro of Tahirih, which arranged the interview, added: “The barbarity of her torture is so severe that I think that as Americans we should be profoundly embarrassed that there’s an industry that facilitates this.”
Thus…
what opportunities do these poor and uneducated women have in the USA? To be wage slaves for the corporate rich as strawberry pickers, Wal-Mart stockers and mop technicians? At least in their native lands they have their families and support structures. There is their familiar culture to sustain them more so than the pop-trash that pervades the US.
If the US can stop using the CIA to interfere with Philippine politics, stop propping up these comprador governments…maybe the Filipinos can revolutionize themselves into a more egalitarian state.
But that’s exactly what the US policymakers hate. They do not want the transnational capitalists to be deprived of the initiative in resource rich Third World countries.
October 8th, 2007 at 8:22 am
email me for more info
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:39 am
Wordlyman, you’re comments are inaccurate, rife with falsehoods and unfairly targeted. America is not the architect of the mail order bride industry. These businesses are almost exclusively owned, operated and managed out of the host nations from which these women are recruited. Please keep them at home.
Further, you’re clearly just an “America Hater.” If you feel so strongly about the condition of your third world country, get off your collective rears and build a better economy, elelct better leaders and do something for yourselves. Better yet, ask your government to reject all the American foreign aid we send. That’ll show us.
January 4th, 2008 at 9:05 am
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April 6th, 2008 at 10:29 am
there is nothing wrong with this mail-order bride thing as long as there is a guarantee that the filipinas would not be abused by their foreign husbands