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Trafficking especially women and children in West Kalimantan, is still vulnerable in various modes, including through order bride. Factors that influence the trafficking include poverty, lack of education, limited employment, patriarchal culture, and weak law enforcement as well as mechanisms and coordination of handling trafficking. This article will explore the issue of trafficking with the mail order bride mode by revealing the problem of what factors are obstacles in law enforcement handling the crime of trafficking in persons with the order bride mode. This article will explore the issue of handling the trafficking with the order bride mode by revealing the problem of what factors are obstacles in law enforcement handling the crime of trafficking in persons with the mail order bride mode. Through the socio-legal research method with a qualitative approach, the research results are obtained that the obstacles faced in handling criminal acts of trafficking with the mail order bride mode are still weak cooperation and coordination between relevant agencies and law enforcement officials, especially these crimes occur in transnational networks.

The stories of early twentieth-century Japanese picture brides--women in arranged marriages coming to the United States to meet the immigrant men to whom they were married by "proxy" according to the popular press--are widely known in memory, scholarship, and popular culture. Less is known about their Southern European counterparts--primarily women from Greece, but also Italy and Armenia--coming to the country at the same time, and to much less public outcry and legislative restrictions. Yet as this article demonstrates, the title of "picture bride" was prominently and popularly applied to Southern European and Japanese women alike as a politically charged racial signifier that provides nuance to the complex yet fluid racial hierarchies of the early twentieth century. This article closely examines popular media depictions of "off-white" picture brides using Greek immigrants as a case study--the predominant European group practicing picture marriage from 1907 to 1924--to demonstrate the quotidian ways that audiences learned the politics of race and immigration through seemingly apolitical messages about family, marriage, and romantic love. This work argues that far from being a mere footnote in Greek American history, picture brides and their popular depictions in national newspapers were critical symbols of Greeks' transition from "in-between" white others to ethnic white Americans. By contextualizing picture marriage as occurring across a diverse racial hierarchy, this work illumines the ways that white supremacy acts in contradictory, often hypocritical ways, excluding some groups while excusing and including others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the efforts of Korean picture brides to promote the upward mobility of their families in California from the 1910s to the 1930s. It analyzes special collections, oral histories, interviews, US government documents, contemporary studies, and newspapers to identify the specific characteristics of Korean picture brides in California and to shed light on their struggles to survive and expand their familial roles. The migration of Korean picture brides to California facilitated the development of unique nuclear families in California's Korean community. Objectively analyzing the impact of the US historical context on Korean picture brides' efforts to improve the socioeconomic status of their families, this study focuses on how these Korean women migrants diversified their roles in the face of California's changing discriminatory environment. It finds that Korean families' successful adjustment to life in California resulted from the varied and complex economic, educational, and emotional roles Korean picture brides adopted to facilitate their families' upward mobility. In adjusting to life as active members of a marginalized community in early twentieth-century California, Korean picture brides exemplified the spirit of pioneer women, leveraging opportunity from adversity by embracing roles that had no precedent in traditional Korean families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article explores the growth of matrimonial agencies and their business practices in New Zealand, and reason some men and women sought assistance in seeking a life partner. Topics discussed include argument of H. G. Cocks's English study on the commercial aspect of agencies, information on matrimonial advertisements, and explanation on why women turned to agencies for assistance in finding potential partners.

The article examines the reasons behind the failure of the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA) enacted by the U.S. Congress in 2005 to attain its goal to protect and inform women in the international marriage broker industry. Topics covered include factors that lead Russian women to use a broker business to find a husband in the U.S., the conditions facing mail-order brides and their susceptibility to domestic violence, and a critique of the gaps and shortcomings of IMBRA.

The international introduction industry, more commonly known as the ‘mail order bride’ industry, is often portrayed in American media as a conduit of human trafficking or a ploy by women from ‘third world’ countries to gain access to American citizenship. This study addresses how men participating in the international introduction industry perceived the industry and the agency/sincerity of women who participate in it across three different geographic spaces, namely Ukraine, Colombia and the Philippines, and how these perceptions often adopt racialized discourses that portrays white Ukrainian women as sexy ‘scammers’, while women of color are more likely to be portrayed as victims of poverty and patriarchy. Based on empirical data collected on romance tours within all geographic spaces with male participants, I suggest that men’s racialized assumptions regarding women’s intentions within the industry, as well as what type of agency they possess, are heavily based on tropes of the third world as backwards, traditional, and static. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issue of human trafficking that uses such strategies as mail order bride and internet-based international arranged marriage as of January 2016. Also examined are the commercial Internet marriage brokering industry in such countries as Japan, Australia, and Canada, the enactment of the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act, and the issue of female enslavement.

This study aims to conceptualize how mail-order brides are situated within a marriage market that is specific to Western masculine hegemony but not necessarily to the individuals who are involved. Through a discourse analysis of international dating website content, this article shows how the "domestic exotic" materializes. This despatialized "she" is decontextualized through her exotic foreignness and recontextualized into ideological Western schemas of marriage and the nuclear family. The paradoxes between local and global, commercial and natural, past and present, are sustained through her incorporation into the intimate realm of sex and reproduction. The purpose of this analysis is to provide a lens into the ways in which foreign brides are marketed to Western men as the solution to their romantic woes and as the leverage through which individual men can articulate their gendered, geographic, and material dominance through the traditional nuclear family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article unpacks the fantasy of the Russian online bride and its striking contamination with geopolitical language. Drawing on critical geopolitics and psychoanalysis, it explores the economy of desire and anxiety that accompanies British men's quest for sexually available 'traditional' housewives that are still untouched by 'modern' feminism. The paper argues that these men desire the slippery substance of Easternness - an ideal object of desire which is too elusive to be conquered or held. The paper thereby inverts existing accounts of the sexualised nature of the geopolitical gaze to expose the traces of geopolitics in sexual fantasies themselves. In doing so, it formulates the basis for a triadic understanding of otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented in which the author explores challenges associated with mail order marriages. Topics discussed include the views of law professor Melissa Murray on the social importance of marriage, the role of educational gap in enhancing marriage crisis, and the role of mail order marriages in encouraging abuse of mail order brides.

The article focuses on the impact of the history of the mail-order bride industry, gender stereotypes and domestic abuse on the foreign brides market. Topics discussed include attempts by the U.S. government to punish persons involved in the industry's exploitation of women, alternative approaches to increase protection of mail-order brides in the U.S. and the compliance of the marriage intermediates called as International Marriage Brokers with the U.S. immigration policies.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Plan me no plans I'm in no rush Maybe I've learned Playing with matches A girl can get burned So, Bring me no ring Groom me no groom [...]

This article explores the absent and silenced voice in Australian newspapers through case studies of two Filipino women - Nenita Westhof and Marylou Orton - who were victims of homicide in Australia. It draws on a feminist discourse analysis of newspaper articles and interviews conducted with their families and friends. The method used is one way of enabling people to hear the stories of those who do not have a voice in the present. Analysing newspaper representations in light of the interviews provides an entirely different, more accurate and just reconstruction of the women's lives. Media representations of Nenita and Marylou bore little resemblance to their 'lived reality'. In most instances, journalists did not acknowledge that the women were victims of domestic violence. Furthermore, sexist, racist and class-based discourses constructed Nenita and Marylou in accordance with dominant representations of Filipino women in Australia. They were held accountable for their own deaths, while their abusive male partners were frequently portrayed as victims of women who abused them. The article argues that such representations sensationalize the issues, misrepresent violence as the women's fault and shift responsibility from the perpetrator to the victim. In the process, they silence women's voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Jasmine," by Bharati Mukherjee is presented. It outlines the character of Jasmine, the heroine, whose path in the U.S. started from being an undocumented transnational migrant worker to domestic servant to caretaker to sex worker, and to mail-order bride. The author shares that the novel serves as a more effective updated racial-sexual-national matrix. After the death of her first love, the author notes that Jasmine entertains multiple marriage proposals.

The present study proposes a model of using the Multicultural Family Support Centers and adjustment among foreign brides and their interethnicand interracial families in South Korea based on the narratives of 10 foreign brides married to Korean men and 11 service providers who directly interact with these women and their families. The results illustrate how programs offered through Multicultural Family Support Centers serve as a bridge for these families to pass through mistrust and conflict to reach a point of intimacy and unity as a family. Recommendations for the Multicultural Family Support Centers are made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade clever marketing and wider access to the internet has led to the exponential growth of ‘mail-order’ marriage industries, vastly increasing the number of women who migrate for marriage using these commercial services. Taken within the context of global predatory capitalism, such phenomenon is of interest in that it appears to convene in its dynamics the intersecting operation of gender and class inequality, sexism, racism, and colonialism that, far from diminishing, seems only to further intensify with the increase in transnational cross-border traffic between populations. In this study, we investigate the complicity of knowledge-production practices within popular culture in the perpetuation of such dynamics within the ‘mail-order’ marriage industry. In particular, we focus on the politics of representation around the figure of the so-called ‘mail-order bride’ as produced in various genres and sites in North America over the past 15 years. Our study revealed, as expected, an intensely narrow and colonialist discourse constituting the women involved in such commercial transactions as commodity objects, victims, or victimizers. But, as well, we found five potentially counter-hegemonic works that serve to represent an alternative discourse that at least gestures toward a more diverse and complex representation of these women and of married life, employing devices such as irony, parody, spoofing, and other tongue-in-cheek references. However, as our conclusion demonstrates, despite such admirable interventions, some aspects of agency-arranged marriages remain utterly absent in North American popular culture, thereby perpetuating and ultimately failing to displace the dominant discourse on this population of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Catherine looks out across the water, she wonders what her life will be like when she reaches Virginia. She knows that conditions will be hard, but life in England was also hard. At least in the colony, there is the possibility of improvement. The Virginia Company has assured her and the other women that they will have their choice of marriage partners. They have promised that the men are wealthy, or at least will be wealthy with the women's help. Moreover, in Virginia, as a married woman she has the right to share in her husband's wealth. Catherine knows it is a risk, but she has been assured she can always return home if she changes her mind. Regardless, Catherine expects to stay. There is little for her back in England. She will marry a colonist and help found a nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of Asian women immigrants in Oregon, noting legal discrimination as a factor in the citizenship of Asian American women. Topics include the portrayal of Asian American women in Portland, Oregon as prostitutes, the phenomenon of picture brides marrying men in the U.S. before having met them then immigrating, and the effects of legislation on immigration. Groups addressed included Chinese, Japanese, and Korean women. It is said that Asian women were not subservient in their relation to immigration regulations.

Along the lines of a qualitative inquiry, this article discusses two dichotomous academic interpretations of mail-order-bride services: it investigates the conditions under which mail-order-bride agencies have proliferated into a large-scale industry, and analyses the content specificities of mail-order-bride agencies that advertise Eastern European brides. Methodologically, the research employs a three-level content analysis with a sample of twenty-four marriage agencies selected from the top one hundred entries from the Google.com search engine. The findings indicate that not only do mail-order-bride agencies merchandise Eastern European women as a trendy product, they also promote inequalities on the basis of economic condition, gender, race, and national origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses activism by Filipino marriage migrants in Australia. According to the author, global migration of Filipinos is highly gendered and the migration trajectories are reflective of the restructuring of the international economy, which demands cheap labor in the service industries. Topics include the high percentage of Filipino women in Australia who are mail-order brides and the activism of Filipino marriage migrants, such as their participation in immigrant women’s organizations. The author examines the activism by Filipino women as a form of citizenship practice and argues that racialized marriage migrants are a demonstration of lived activism in which the quotidian of their lives is fostered by community interaction or participation in immigrant women’s groups.

The article offers information on mail-order bride industry. It discusses the operation of international marriage agencies in the world, along with the laws regulating them in several countries including the U.S., Taiwan, and Belarus. It also presents recommendations to enhance regulation of international marriage agencies.

This paper discusses how Philippine transnational marriage migration is intertwined in complex and paradoxical ways with global, local and personal matters. My argument will blur the artificial and still dominant analytical division between marriage migrants (wives or “mail order” brides) and labour migrants (workers – mainly domestic workers). Focusing on the life histories of different Filipina women, the paper illustrates the intersections and multiplicity of their roles as wives, mistresses, workers, mothers, daughters and citizens in a transnational migratory space. Furthermore, I go along with those scholars who argue that women do not only marry in order to migrate, but that they also migrate in order to marry, as marriage is seen as an important aspect of social fulfilment. By carefully investigating these emerging transnational or even global marriage-scapes, I analyze the different motives, logics and desires that come into play. While women from the Philippines may look for “modern husbands” and “modern marriages” because of local constraints on their marriage opportunities, many western men turn to Asia and the Philippines for “traditional” wives whom they imagine to be more “conservative” and “less demanding.” Both often discover that their gender stereotypes are more imagined than real. The stories illustrate how Filipina migrants use different socio-cultural and socio-economic situations across transnational space – and at times against local gender constructions – in order to renegotiate and reclaim a respectable and desired marital status. On the one hand, these women are subject to manifold localised, legal and religious-moral definitions as women and wives. On the other hand, they creatively and actively utilise structural differences and new opportunities across transnational space to redefine themselves. The stories thus show both the women’s agency and the importance of structural factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to contribute new perspectives to the mail-order bride discourse and insights of transnational marriages between Thai women and European men. According to Danish and international context, there are five important themes that describe the discourse. These include the notion that the woman is a victim of illegal trafficking, Thai women are victims of violence, and represent a weak group without a social network in Denmark or connections to their country of origin. Moreover, an ethnographic context, a care-economic analysis of transnational marriages, and how a transnational network helps these marriages are presented.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Jennifer Musto on the influence of U.S. government's position on human trafficking to the organization and leading ideology of non-government organizations (NGOs), one by Sholeh Shahrokhi on sex trafficking in Iran, and one by Sine Plambech on the mail order bride discourse on transnational marriages between Thai women and European men.

With globalization, the number of individuals traveling, working or studying abroad is rising globally, and so is the number of international marriages. However, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of 'mail-order brides' through matchmaking since the 1970s in the Western world and since the 1990s in several Asian countries. The so-called 'mail-order bride' phenomenon has become an important route for international migration, especially for gendered migration. Since official relations with China began in August 1992, the number of Korean Chinese women who came into Korea for marriage with native Korean men is about 100,000 between 1990 and 2005. The number of Japanese women who married Korean men is approximately 17,000, while the numbers of Filipino women who married Korean men is about 6000. Recently, the nationalities of these foreign wives of Korean men have expanded to include women from Vietnam, Russia, and Uzbekistan. In 2005, among a total of 250,000 foreign spouses in Korea, 160,000 of them were women. The Korean state had contributed to initiate these international marriages by importing Korean Chinese women for their unmarried rural citizens. As international marriages have become a social issue, the state tries to cope with these new issues through changing the laws and policies. Utilizing several government statistics, a nationwide questionnaire survey of nearly 1000 foreign brides with various nationalities, which was conducted in May and June 2005, and some interviewed data of foreign wives and government personnel, this paper analyzes (1) patterns and trends of marriage migration to Korea; (2) the issues and problems of foreign brides, such as their status and citizenship, economic situation, access to social security and 'fake marriages' issues; and (3) recent changes in governmental policies towards them. Special focus will be on what factors influenced the recent governmental action and how the ideology that 'A married daughter is no longer a daughter ([image omitted])' is still reflected in recent policies even in today's more progressive society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the work of graphic novelist Mark Kalesniko, particularly the desperation experienced by his characters. The graphic novel "Mail Order Bride" takes place in the fictionalized town of Bandini and is semi-autobiographical in that it focuses on the relationship between a Korean woman, Kyung Seo, and a Canadian man, Monty Wheeler. Kyung's transition away from Monty's domination and towards an expression of her own selfhood. Kalesniko's artwork and his representation of bodies as an exploration into wider issues of orientalism and Western conceptions of Eastern sexuality.

This study identifies risk factors for Vietnamese American women's abuse. Intensive interviews with 129 Vietnamese women immigrants in a northeastern metropolitan area provided data to examine risk factors for sexual, physical, and verbal abuse. Patriarchal gender arrangements in the family, arguments about fulfilling gender and family roles, and partner's threat that divorce would compromise the participant's immigration status put women at risk for each type of abuse. "Picture brides" were at heightened risk for sexual abuse. For women with limited resources, education and interventions within the ethnic immigrant community are critical to addressing wile abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis is based upon the experiences of Civil Society, a provider of legal and support services to immigrants who are victims of crime, regulatory violations and unscrupulous business practices in St. Paul, Minnesota since 1996. The types of victimizations covered range from sexual harassment to defrauding immigrants of tax credits to consumer frauds-to labor law violations to domestic abuse and mail order brides. Contrary to what advocates of policies promoting acculturation and integration of immigrants might expect, the analysis finds that the victimization of immigrants increases as they seek to acculturate into society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the author's analysis of some of the scholarly and popular depictions of mail order brides as trafficked women. The author also examines blurs that enter some of the scholarly and activist literature on mail order brides. Finally, the author highlights the heterogeneity in the experiences, circumstances and expressions of agency of women who correspond with men. The author's perception on correspondence marriage was influenced by literature on prostitutes.

The article deals with the incorporation of Asian mail-order brides into U.S. families. The number of marriages each year occurring through international matchmaking services is difficult to estimate. Using surveys by linguistics professor Robert J. Scholes of such companies, the Bureau of Citizenship estimated the number of these marriages to be between 4,000 and 6,000 in 1998. The number of mail-order marriages continues to climb.

Two studies explored the mating strategies and mate preferences of mail order brides (MOBs) from three different countries. In the first study, 48 Colombian MOBs were compared with 44 single Colombian women who were not MOBs on a variety of attitudinal and demographic characteristics. Both groups also identified qualities that they wished to communicate about themselves to a prospective mate, qualities that they most desired in a mate, and qualities that they believed were most highly sought after by a prospective mate. In the second study, the expressed mate preferences of 60 MOBs from Colombia, Russia, and the Philippines were compared. With only minor cross-cultural variability, both studies confirmed the importance of characteristics such as commitment, ambition, and sexual fidelity that have been identified in previous studies of female mate choice. The results are discussed within a framework of evolutionary explanations for mate preferences in human females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on cyberbrides in the Americas and the transnational routes of U.S. masculinity. The design of a Latin Ameican woman from outside the U.S. speaks to the power of erotic imagination and the role of technology in transporting one's personal fantasies into a transnational social forum. The self-help model of individual transformations hijacks the feminist model of consciousness-raising, evacuating its radical potential through personalizing social transformation, and makes evident self-help's genealogical roots within Christianity and Western individualism.

This article analyses the profiles of a sample of Russian women seeking partners from western countries collected from the website of an Internet marriage agency. The popular viewpoint is that such women, in possible collusion with the agency, use the anonymity of the Internet to create an image of a perfect partner for a western male. Taking the information at face value, the article compares single women seeking partners to women featured in a 'Success Stories' section. The study finds that although most of the self-reported information is not significantly different across the two groups, women from major cities (which are the locations of 'romance tours') are twice as likely to be successful. Surprisingly, standard factors valued in marriage markets do not matter. The findings are interpreted as evidence of the importance of face-to-face meetings and as partial support for the authenticity of the data included in the profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of International Migration & Integration is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article problematises the discourses on commercially arranged marriages, commonly seen as a form of trafficking in women or mail-order brides (MOB), by focusing on a less discussed aspect of commercial marriage migration--namely, the matchmaking and/or marriage brokerage operation. Drawing upon empirical studies of marriages between Taiwanese men and women from South-East Asia and the People's Republic of China, I look at the changing operations of the marriage brokerage industry, the relations between the actors involved prior to, during and after matchmaking and marriage, and the actors' own perceptions of these operations. The main arguments are that: (a) the marriage brokers play a key role in motivating potential brides/ grooms to enter into international marriages and give shape to their preferences in mate choice; and (b) cross-border marriage migration has taken on a very traditional form, involving complex, localised social networks in which women play an active role. As a result, the brokering industry goes beyond mere commercial activities to involve the other types of social relations that are sustained throughout the marriage. Finally, I argue that (c) money 'transactions' at the time of a wedding do not necessarily make women a traded 'commodity'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the mail-order bride (MOB) trade, an industry involving the trafficking of women from the Third World to husbands in the First World. Levels of inequality that make the bride subordinate to her First World husband; Issues involving government immigration policy; Scenarios which await the MOB once she arrives in Canada or the U.S.