Is Mail Order Bride Legal?
When a man comes to the idea to find mail-order wife online, one of the first concerns is the legality of the service. Lots of people still connect the issue with a literal purchase of a woman or even trafficking of humans. However, that is not true in the 21st century anymore (mostly). In the modern world, mail order bride services are just one of the approaches to online dating and have preserved the name historically. Online dating agencies today are serious and provide professional assistance for successful matchmaking and a large database of users to make it possible for you to search for your wife.
Who mail-order brides are?
To understand the legal nature of the issue, it is vital to know, who those girls are. They are women living in different countries (which are usually developing) and searching for their true love and better standards of life.
It is their own decision to join a corresponding agency to look for a suitable partner. None of them is forced to become a mail order bride against own will. There are various reasons for becoming mail-order brides:
- Poverty in the country of their residence;
- Absence of job or opportunity for education;
- A small number of men;
- The opportunity for self-realization;
- Inability to find a soulmate;
- The desire to widen the search;
- The necessity to support the family;
- Disrespect and brutal treatment;
- The discrepancy between their requirements and local guys’ qualities.
There might be other reasons for such a solution buy it is still an expression of the ladies’ free will to become one of the brides abroad.
How do the services work?
The process of matchmaking is always transparent. It can be described as follows:
- A man registers on a mail order bride website.
- He creates a profile, adds photos, writes about his purposes and requirements.
- Starts searching for a woman he likes.
- Buys membership/credits to be able to talk to various girls or use additional features (the majority
- of sites require fees for the provision of professional services).
- Finds a suitable lady and develops relations.
- If both of them have feelings for each other and want to have something serious, they can meet in real life.
The result of successful relations built with the help of mail-order bride services is official marriage or non-official living together (depending on the spouses’ preferences, the same as having or non-having children).
The legal issue
The greatest part of men looking for a bride abroad lives in the USA, Canada, Australia, and the EU. Due to this, there are different laws connected with the issue. In the US, there is The International Marriage Broker Regulation Act, which provides the rules concerning financial information and criminal history of a man planning to take a mail-order bride to his country. Such data and his marital history should be disclosed. All the information is to be transferred to a bride. Only after written consent and checking her background, their marriage in the US becomes possible.
In addition, such brides also get information concerning immigration, domestic violence, and child/spousal support. Such a policy is determined by the well-developed international marriage system.
Another act in the US created for mail order brides is the Violence Against Women Act. It contains the provisions allowing the girls, who become victims of abuse, applying for a green card without the support of their husband.
As for the legislation of the countries, those ladies come from, such services are legal in the majority of them (but there are countries, where it is not). The global community is very concerned about the rights of women since their liberation. More attention is paid to the issue by the third-world countries participating in the UN. The number of women coming to the US to get married started increasing in the 1970s. Since 1983, the number of Asian girls has been growing significantly.
As statistics show, international marriages with mail-order brides are very popular. The number of divorces is impressively small compared to traditional marriages (twice as smaller). It proves that the legal system for the regulation of mail order bride services works well and helps build stronger connections between people from various countries.