VietNamNet Bridge – More services should be made available to women who opted to marry foreign husbands to help save them from falling prey to illegal marriage brokers, said Nguyen Thi Thanh Huong, deputy head of Viet Nam Women's Union's Family – Society Unit.

Women receiving advices in HCM City about marriage to South Koreans. Experts say more services should be available to help Vietnamese women make sound decisions about foreign marriages. — VNA/VNS Photo The Vinh

The union, which is the only agency that can provide consultative services to women who marry to foreigners, recently established 16 centres offering consultative services on marriage and family issues. These centres are in the provinces with the highest numbers of women married to foreigners such as Lam Dong, Binh Phuoc and Can Tho.

The union also co-operated with South Korean government to set up an online database where Vietnamese women could provide personal information and pictures so that foreign men could consider whether they might be a good match.

She said it was one of several ways to prevent marriages where the couples knew nothing about their partners until the brides arrived in the grooms' countries.

"The information is just the first step and if a foreigner is interested in a Vietnamese woman, he has to visit her so that they can get to know each other," Huong said.

"The method was not well received when it was first launched in 2007 but things have been improved. This month alone, four marriages between people that met online took place in the northern province of Hai Duong; all of the male partners were South Korean."

Pham Quoc Nhat of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism's Family Department said that the reasons why women were choosing to marry foreigners more often differed from province to province. But one thing these women shared was that they came from very poor families and had low levels of education and no stable job.

He said women in the Mekong Delta, notably Can Tho City, were motivated by material comfort and by the belief that there was no better way for daughters to show their gratitude to their parents than marrying a rich husband.

The women in the north, most from Hai Phong City and Hai Duong and Quang Ninh provinces tended to marry men from Taiwan and South Korea so they could work in industrial zones in those countries without having to pay commission, which could be up to VND100 million (US$5,000), Nhat said.

Huong from the Women's Union said that these women were overly trusting and easily tempted into marrying a foreigner if there were other women in the neighbourhood who demonstrated that doing so was a positive life-changing experience.

She said consultative services were crucial to ensure women had adequate information about what it meant to marry a foreign husband.

Nhat said the punishment meted out to illegal marriage brokers was little more than a slap on the wrist and that the business remained very lucrative.

Women also had to take more responsibility for their own lives, looking into the matter properly before tragedies occurred.

Tran Thi Le Hoa from the Ministry of Justice said: "Actually our legal procedures for registration of marriage with foreigners which require the presence of both the prospective brides and grooms at the office help significantly reduce the number of illegal marriages."

"Our rules are stricter than regulations in other countries which allow a person to authorise another person to register for marriage on their behalf. In some cases, grooms take advantage of this provision to legalise the marriage without ever having seen the bride," she said.

Hoa pointed out one disturbing fact: many Vietnamese brides give up their original nationality as soon as they leave for their husbands' countries.

"Many Vietnamese women end up holding no citizenship when their unhappy marriages are over and have no way to return to Viet Nam," she said.

Statistics from the Ministry of Justice showed that this year 120,000 Vietnamese women were married to Taiwanese men and another 35,000, to South Korean men.

VietNamNet/Viet Nam News