Online Matchmaking: Email Brides

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email order brides

This page considers 'e-bride' scams - email offers of dalliance with beautiful women in other jurisdictions and online catalogues of brides for sale - and internet-related trafficking.

It covers -

introduction
demand - who buys cyberbrides?
business and scams
incidents
studies

introduction

People have used the media during at least the past 150 years to supplement personal networks in finding a mate, relying on a commercial agent for identification of a particular individual or for identification of a number of individuals (one of whom would be chosen by that agent's client on the basis of beauty, docility, age or other attributes).

Arranged marriages have been a feature of many societies and phenomena such as wedding fairs or bride auctions (often with the attributes of a cattle market) have been evident in Western societies and in other societies.

'Mail order brides' (and mail order husbands) are, however, relatively new. The emergence of mail order spouse schemes reflects factors such as -

the growth of literacy among consumers
new expectations that a specialist commercial agent might offer a better mechanism for finding a partner than traditional matchmakers
the development of mass postal mail
major population movements (eg of Scandinavians and Eastern Europeans to North America)
ease of long-distance travel from one location to another (especially from one with a lower standard of living)

Uptake of the internet has been accompanied by the emergence of online mail order schemes.

Those schemes are evident in sites that feature a catalogue of women who might be married by men in more advanced economies, often married with the expectation that the partner will be unloaded when she reaches her 'use-by date' or otherwises proves to be unsatisfactory.

They are also evident in spam that purports to be from an individual woman in search of a husband or that promotes an agency that claims to represent several such candidates for a wedding-based escape from the poverty (or merely dreariness) of life in the Ukraine, Thailand or Philippines.

Online mail-ordering of a spouse - sometimes euphemistically characterised as an "international correspondence service" - has attracted the attention of regulators and some human rights advocates. That attention is evident in criticisms that some schemes -

are simply mechanisms for extracting money from lonely, desperate or merely gullible men - who hand over substantial sums in agency fees and/or gifts to the supposed partner but never actually meet the supposed potential partner
serve as opportunities for evading migration restrictions, with the wife abandoning the husband once citizenship requirements have been met
provide a basis for sexual slavery (with 'foreign brides' chosen by men whose attributes mean that they are unlikely to find and retain a partner from among their peers) and commodification
reinforce diasporic ghettos, with migrants choosing wives "from the old country".

The following paragraphs look at business models (in particular scams), regulatory questions, particular incidents and studies.

Not all cyberbride businesses are scams but egregious bad practice means the industry operates under a cloud and arguably will continue to do so.

demand

What is the basis of the online bride business, one in which a mate - disposable or otherwise - can be acquired through an unsolicited email offer or from a catalogue of beauties featured on a marriage broker's site?

Critics have often concentrated on consumer attitudes, noting that much of the marketing is oriented to 'buyers' who are gullible and whose attitude to gender relationships is problematical, embodying expectations that women will be submissive and can be replaced - potentially on a serial basis - if they come to question the man's commands. Other critics have moved beyond gendered critiques, recognising that some gay men are acquiring partners from offshore on the basis that those partners are in an economically less powerful position.

One journalist quipped that online services offer "Mail Order Brides: Beautiful, Foreign, and Yours for a Small Chunk of Change".

A Russian site thus claims that

Russian women have a much better education than the brides from Asia and Latin America. About 90% of the women that apply to our agency have college or university degrees. With their Caucasian appearance, their intelligence and their astounding beauty, men have often asked me if our selection is real! Our women appear too beautiful to be seeking husbands on the Internet.
Being intelligent and educated, Russian women are still feminine, warm and gentle. Competing with men is the last thing they seek in their family lives. The Russian ideal of a man is the man with whom she feels like she is "behind the stone wall", the leader, the provider and the protector. Believe it or not, the reason for all these beautiful Russian women seeking their destiny over the Internet is that they cannot find their ideal man in Russia. It is that simple.

A competitor claims that

Women from Asia are feminine. They typically have smooth, silky, hairless skin. Women from Asia are gentle. These women do not scold you, and call you a male chauvinist when you hold open a door for them. Women from Asia appreciate the way western men treat their women. Western men, especially American men have very good reputations. We are world famous for treating women with respect and consideration. Women from Asia value marriage. They do not believe in divorce. They marry for life. They believe in finding the right man and sticking by him, in good times and bad. Husband and children never take second place to her career. Women from Asia value maturity. If you are older than your woman, that's not a problem, it's a plus. Asian women respect maturity. It signifies wisdom, stability, experience and gentleness.

Who are the consumers? There is little agreement in government and academic studies. Services do not provide authoritative data about customers to third parties and there is little tabulation by regulatory agencies (which for example merely note that there has been a complaint rather than that the complainant was balding, unshaven, unemployed and unwashed). The demographics of consumers in Australia or elsewhere are thus unclear.

It has been variously claimed on the basis of anecdotal information that the cyberbride market is biased towards 'trailer trash' (men whose personal inadequacies, low earnings and other attributes mean that they are marginal) or towards men whose digital proficiency outweighs their social skills (what one contact cruelly labelled the Asperger & Pizza demographic).

One observer claims that

Research has also shown that the majority of web daters are urban, professional and technologically literate, with an appealing amount of disposable income, somewhat diminishing the image of the lonely, sinister man rubbing his hands together as his fated bride is handed over by the delivery boy.

Presumably, however, the man can be sinister, lonely, affluent and online: those attributes are not mutually exclusive.

the business

Legitimate cyberbride businesses use the same model as some dating services, typically generating revenue from -

subscriptions by consumers, which might be around US$200 per month
charges paid by consumers for particular types of access or services (eg US$5 or US$15 for more details about 'Tatiana' or for her email address)
fees paid by the featured person for appearance on the site
advertising by third parties (eg migration agents and trousseau suppliers)
sale of consumer data to third parties, with our without the knowledge and consent of those individuals

Robert Scholes' study The Mail Order Bride Industry and Its Impact on US Immigration notes a site that had operated since 1974 and featured over 6,800 potential brides, of whom 4,600 were from Asia (3,050 from the Philippines), 1,700 from Russia and Ukraine and others from Latin America. That site claimed some 1,000 customers at any one time, charged around US$200 per month.

Practice by other sites is more problematical, with the site operator for example sharing revenue received in response to requests by its women for gifts and service fees (which range from translations through to official registrations and travel services when the consumer is persuaded to visit the woman or fund a short-term visit by the potential partner).

Other services are blatant scams. Some consumers for example have paid for tours to the nation of the potential partner, expecting to meet one or more women in the flesh, but are then fobbed off with tales that the woman has changed her mind, is ill, has died or is otherwise unavailable. Complaints by the victims of such scams have on occasion met with physical assaults by agents of the service provider or threats that the complainant will be imprisoned for a breach of hitherto unidentified law (eg currency dealings).

Images on cyberbride sites and email may be false, with reports that consumers have encountered the same photo being used to identify what are ostensibly separate individuals and that some photos are blithely lifted from dating sites, personal profiles on Facebook and its peers or even from media coverage of Eastern European and Asian celebrities. (Russian examples are misuse of photos of Bolshoi ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, actress Janna Friske and singers Irina Saltykova and Julia Nachalova.)

Consumer gullibility is important.

It is reflected in the deluge of spam supposedly emanating from beautiful and oh so unattached people in Eastern Europe and Asia, offering romance but usually without any indication that the potential partner knows anything about the recipient of that message. Would a consumer respond to a call made out of the blue by a 'Anastasia' or 'Tatiana' who does not know anything about the person answering the phone?

As with the 419 Scam, it is also reflected in the willingness of victims to hand over money - and keep handing it over, often in larger amounts - on the basis of implausible explanations or merely calls to "trust your heart" and "find true love".

Some victims have thus engaged in online/offline correspondence and even telephone calls to the beloved, providing money for an air ticket, a visa and other expenses. On receipt of the loot the 'relationship' evaporates, with the woman's email address for example ging dead and postal correspondence being unanswered when the victim is abandoned. It is unclear whether the correspondence actually came from a woman or instead emanated from a bored male geek busy pretending to be 300 sultry Ukrainian beauties, many of whom had an identical photograph.

Police, other regulators and human rights activists have expressed concern about use of e-bride scams as a basis for prostitution. Gangs, typically with an ethnic affiliation, are reported to have coerced women into participating in e-bride schemes. The women gain citizenship in a more affluent country through marriage. That relationship is subsequently formally or tacitly abandoned, with the wife - willingly or otherwise - turning to prostitution in the new country on behalf of the gang.

In the US the Mail Order Bride Business Act of 2005 (MOBBA) seeks to regulate commercial mail-order bride services, with an emphasis on protecting foreign women from being abused, held without their consent or stalked. It has been criticised by 'wife-shoppers' who argue that they should not be obligated to disclose personal information such as past marriages, offspring or alcohol and drug-related offences.

studies

Points of entry to the literature on 'email brides' include Gayle Letherby & Jen Marchbank's 'Cyber Chattels: buying brides and babies on the net' in Dot.cons: Crime, deviance and identity on the internet (Cullompton: Willan 2003) edited by Yvonne Jewkes, Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and "Mail Order" Marriages (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2003) by Nicole Constable, Laura María Agustín's Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (London: Zed 2007) and Globalisation, Sex and Profits - Are governments doing enough to prevent the global expansion of the sex industry? (PDF) by Antonio Centrella, Sam Gray-Murphy, Soula Morfidis & Emma Sommerville and the sobering US report to Congress on International Matchmaking Organisations (PDF).

Broader questions of power, opportunity and wealth are explored in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan 2003) edited by Barbara Ehrenreich & Arlie Hochschild, Dennis Altman's Global Sex (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2001) and Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (Boston: South End Press 2000) by Grace Chang.

For varying views on trafficking see Louise Shelley's 2003 'Trafficking in Women: The Business Model Approach' in 10(1) Brown Journal of World Affairs, Donna Hughes & Tatyana Denisova's 2001 'The Transnational Political Criminal Nexus of Trafficking in Women from Ukraine' in 6 Trends in Organized Crime, Patricia Tanton's 2000 dissertation 'Mail Order Marriage and Global Imperialism', Trafficking And Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives On Migration, Sex Work And Human Rights (New York: Paradigm 2005) edited by Kamala Kempadoo, Trafficking & the Global Sex Industry (Lanham: Lexington 2006) by Delila Amir and Riitta Vartti's 2001 paper German Matchmaking Websites: Online Trafficking in Women?

They are complemented by Donna Hughes - whose claims are noted in the Censorship Guide on this site - in Use of New Communications and Information Technologies for Exploitation of Women and Children (PDF) and Welcome to the Rape Camp: Trafficking, Prostitution & the Internet in Cambodia (PDF).

Among regulatory studies see in particular the outstanding Canadian report Trafficking in Women in Canada: A Critical Analysis of the Legal Framework Governing Immigrant Live-in Caregivers and Mail-Order Brides, Robert Scholes' study The Mail Order Bride Industry and Its Impact on US Immigration, Eithne Luibheid's Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota Press 2002), Anthony Destefano's The War on Human Trafficking: US Policy Assessed (Rutgers Uni Press 2007), Trafficking and the Sex Industry: from Impunity to Protection (PDF) - a 2003 brief for the Australian Parliament by Kerry Carrington & Jane Hearn, and Human Trafficking (Cullompton: Willan 2007) edited by Maggy Lee. Border control and immigration regimes are discussed in more detail here.

Regional studies include Cross-Border Marriages: Gender And Mobility In Transnational Asia (Philadelphia: Uni of Pennsylvania Press 2004) by Nicole Constable, Leidholt's 'Sexual trafficking of women in Europe' in Sexual Politics and the European Union (London: Bergahn 1996) edited by R. Amy Elman and Alison Murray's thoughtful 'Debt bondage and trafficking' in Global Sex Workers (London: Routledge 1998) edited by Kamala Kempadoo & Jo Doezema.

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