MAIL ORDER BRIDES from the Philippines
Their parents had divorced and their father was found 45 minutes later on a nearby road suffering from what appeared to be a drug overdose. The treatment of Filipino mail order brides is slowly being recognised as a problem of, as yet, unknown depths. The former president of the Philippines, Mrs Corazon Aquino, called for an investigation into the deaths and disappearances while in Australia this year. In South Australia, one man has been married five times to mail order brides and is believed to be negotiating for another after his last left him. One of his partners, who spoke to The Advertiser on condition of anonymity, said she had left after fearing for her life. She said the man and his adult children had treated her as an unpaid servant. "He was angry all the time, he used to work all the time and then come home and yell. I tried to be a good wife. I couldn't understand it," she said. She left after going to the local hospital with broken bones. Another spoke of being locked in a bedroom for two weeks with her children, while her husband was home. In the afternoons, she urinated into the bottle she drank rainwater out of in the morning.
Filipino mail order brides - Their experiences
Workers in women's shelters claimed many of the men who married Filipino mail order brides were suffering from mental illness and had been unable to cope in earlier relationships. Ms Joan Dicka, a Filipino working with mail order brides, said they were seen to be easily dominated. "Many of these women are frightened of their husbands; they are being assaulted or locked up by men who have brought them into this country," she said. Ms Dicka, a science graduate and former social worker in the Philippines, spoke bluntly about the quality of some husbands. "They are the sort of men nobody else would want. Many of them are divorced from Australian women and they see Filipino mail order brides as being easy to push down," she said.
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