At the beginning of the last decade, about 15,000 marriages were arranged annually through the Russian brides system.
Companies operating dating services in Eastern countries and Asia speak of stories of love and dreams fulfilled. International institutions for the protection of women, human trafficking.
We explain to you where this business that started in the 19th century comes from and which today is at the center of the controversy.
It is impossible that you have not seen the ads. Websites promoting a catalog, as if they were cattle, of Russian brides (or women from Eastern Europe) who want to meet and marry a foreigner.
Website names such as Your Russian Partner, BestBrides.net, Russian Girls, and Single Ukrainian Girls leave no room for doubt. Nor are the abundant guides for men to navigate these pages safely. But what is behind these businesses, considered international marriage agencies for those who exploit them and human trafficking schemes for their critics?
Russian Brides: When did the Practice of Dating by Mail Start
First, a little history. Websites to meet Eastern European women to marry is just the latest incarnation of a model that has existed for centuries: mail order brides or, in Spanish, mail order brides to Russian dating.
Lawrence Lynch, in his book ‘Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches’, places the beginning of this practice at the end of the 17th century, when English and French women migrated to the east coast of what later became the United States and Canada to become the wives of the colonists.
Russian Brides: this is How Those Who Exploit Their Businesses Defend Their Businesses
There are two main positions regarding this type of service. Logically, promoters and entrepreneurs linked to them defend them, telling success stories on their websites. Critics, including anti-trafficking organizations and academics, call them a form of exploitation or human trafficking.
In Elena’s Models, for example, they tell the story of Max, “a Mexican who after only two days” was contacted by “a beautiful Russian girl named Anastasia”. “He could not believe how perfect her profile was and fell instantly in love with her seductive gray eyes,” they write, in a tone typical of a seedy little love novel. Not to make a long story short, they spoke via video conference a few times, then Max visited her in Russia during her vacation, and they finally got married in Cancun.
One way to see how this industry works is internal information, such as that provided by a supposed Russian brides worker on Reddit, who answered a user questionnaire. Part of the interest it arouses can be seen in the 510 comments housed in the thread. An important part of the questions is about the possibility that everything is a scam or the “girlfriend”, once her US citizenship is secured, abandons her husband.
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The maximum reification of them can be seen in many questions regarding whether they charge shipping or there is a return policy. According to her account, her business earns money from membership and communication costs.
Russian Brides: the Arguments of the Critics
In one of the responses, the worker says that “for one part of the world, we are traffickers of women.” In November 2019, the anti-trafficking organization, Just Ask Prevention, dedicated an article to the subject under the title of ‘Mail-Order Brides — A Form of Human Trafficking?’. “International trafficking in women is defined as any situation where women or girls cannot change their immediate conditions of existence, no matter how they arrived at those conditions, and it is a situation in which sexual exploitation and violence are usually involved,” they write.
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