MAIL ORDER BRIDES introduction services
She's a mail order bride gone solo, ten thousand miles from home. When she came to Canada from the Philippines four years ago as a mail order bride, at age 37, her "catch" was typical for some cases - a man in his 50s from small-town Canada with two failed "regular" marriages behind him and the urge for a hassle-free wife. What he really seemed to want was a slave, as do so many of the men using international mail order bride "introduction" services. And he got one, for all too long. For four years, this mail order bride, this former schoolteacher played maid, cook, sex partner and mother of his child to an East Coast businessman, as well as staying by the phones all day to take orders for the business he ran from home, as well as cleaning up after his brother and grown-up son, who lived in the house. In exchange, she was a prisoner in a two-storey home, held captive by a man who constantly insulted her accent and forbid her to make friends with Canadian women, many of whom, he warned her, were lesbians. She was forbidden to join even a church group, many of which, he warned her, were money-grubbing. She was taken out of the house once a week, for church and a drive in the country. And when, a year after arriving, she suddenly went into labor in her seventh month of pregnancy and had to be rushed by midnight ambulance to the nearest city, two hours away, he refused to go with her because he had work to do.
MAIL ORDER BRIDES - Denied custody
So one day last November, when his brother spanked her son so hard he left welts on his behind, she took the child and fled to an emergency women's shelter. Today she is separated and alone, denied custody of their child because she has no relatives here, no money, no legal connections. What has happened to her happened on Canadian soil. It sometimes happens and although laws would be impossible to draw up against mail order brides agencies, since they're disguised often as international dating clubs, we as Canadians should know about the risks such mail order brides face, so we can help them as individuals. After all, it says little about Canada's regard for women, if dozens of Canadian men per year can "order" mail order brides from poverty-striken Third World countries, as a way of getting around having to treat them with decency.
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