Twenty-two cross-border couples walk down the aisle in a joint wedding ceremony hosted by Rotary International at Heritz Wedding Convention Tower in southern Seoul, Oct. 4, 2010. The Korean grooms married brides from Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines and China. Korea Times



This is the second of a two-part series about migrant women in Korea who struggle with risks of deportation, physical threats and psychological hazards in much of their daily lives. ― ED.



Cases of jeopardized marriage migrants in Korea mirror the country's failing systems across welfare, international marriage brokerage and multicultural laws



By Ko Dong-hwan



A Cambodian woman moved to Korea in 2007 for marriage and a new life, but her Korean husband and mother-in-law did not allow her to learn Korean or hold a bank account. They told her they had paid for her labor on their vineyard, ending her dream of becoming a proud immigrant mother. Her husband, ignoring her hope of obtaining Korean citizenship, filed for divorce in 2013. Her mother-in-law then kicked her out of their home.



The Vietnamese wife of a Korean fisherman suffered constant beatings at the hands of his extended family. Five years into marriage, she ran away with her 16-month-old child and 2 million won ($1,800) she had saved after one of her in-laws tried to kill her.



Another Vietnamese woman was married to an alcoholic Korean man 30 years her senior. He was often hospitalized and spent most of their meager government subsidies on liquor and taxis. He kept physically harassing her, even after promising to stop the violence after she had fled to Vietnam. After he broke his second promise and threatened her with a knife to "make her as good as dead" and hid her passport, his sister helped her escape with her child.



In one of the highest-profile crimes in Korea involving a cross-border marriage, a Vietnamese woman was raped repeatedly by her Korean husband's stepfather in 2012 in Jeonju, North Jeolla Province. She escaped by locking herself in a motel bathroom and phoning a Vietnamese friend for help.



The man was arrested and arraigned, but denied the allegations. The court dismissed his plea that the sexual acts were consensual, sentencing him to seven years in jail.



However, it was disclosed that at age 13 she was subject to marriage-by-capture, gang raped and impregnated. Seven months later, her husband filed an annulment suit over her previous "marriage." The dispute lasted more than four years until she left Korea for good.





Rep. Jung Choun-sook of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea and the Women Migrants Human Rights Center of Korea hosted a critical forum at the National Assembly, Oct. 17, to discuss sexual harassment of marriage migrants and measures to safeguard their immigration status. From left on the lectern are Nam Soo-kyung Vitale, a public interest human rights lawyer from Legal Services NYC in the U.S., Wee Eun-jin from Lawyers for a Democratic Society and Cho Sook-hyun from One Law Partners. Courtesy of the Women Migrants Human Rights Center of Korea



These examples are direct testimonies from the victims ― marriage migrants with F-6 visas ― to the Women Migrants Human Rights Center of Korea, a Seoul-based NGO that supports foreign women suffering in troubled cross-border marriages. The agency provides victims with consultations, shelter and free legal support. The victims' identities have been withheld.



The stories represent only a fraction of the more than 20,000 international couples in Korea who married in 2017 alone (Korean husbands with foreign wives 14,869 and 5,966 vice-versa, according to the Korean Statistical Information Service). Each year from 2000 until 2017, cross-border marriages numbered from 11,000 (2000) to as many as 42,000 (2005). And yet, those few extreme cases show that cross-border marriages still can go irreparably wrong.



People often blame the situation on the individuals, considering all the cross-border marriage-friendly policies the government has rolled out. In 2011, the justice ministry launched an international marriage guide program that required Korean men marrying women from China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Thailand to take a four-hour cultural lesson about their spouses. In October 2018, the ministry announced it would offer incentive points to Korean men learning the language of their spouses before inviting them to Korea with F-6 documents.



Despite such government efforts, Heo Young-sook, representative of the Women Migrants Human Rights Center of Korea, argues that the extreme cross-border marriage crises are largely because of the country's poor social structures, not individual delinquency. After working for NGOs defending Korean women's rights until the early 2000s, Heo started supporting female marriage migrants in Korea. She found that foreigners faced situations that were much more serious and desperate than Koreans in similar circumstances, in terms of violence and poverty.



"In most cases of cross-border marriage failure, Korean husbands and foreign wives were both from families living under the poverty line," Heo told The Korea Times. "To my utmost bitterness, I view those cases as scenes of socially vulnerable members reluctantly poised by society to kill each other. It is a structural, not individual problem."



Heo is concerned about the country's ineffective welfare system that has left behind international couples living in some of the poorest conditions. If the "subalterns" could benefit from a government welfare system as developed as that of northern European countries, they would be "left with only a cultural gap to deal with," Heo said.



One case involved a Korean man who stopped paying rent to pay his cross-border marriage brokerage fee and bring his bride to Korea. But without a place to live, the couple drifted from one public bathhouse to another.



"That couple's misery manifests the problem of poverty and a loophole in the government welfare system, rather than personal grievances stemming from miscommunication or violence," Heo said.





The website of a Seoul-based cross-border marriage brokerage agency. It is accessible only by members.



Bad brokers



One of the problematic backdrops weakening Korea's social structures behind cross-border marriage is that brokers often match unsuitable people together. While a hastily arranged marriage between two strangers from different countries is far from promising, the brokers and the Korean government have in part treated matrimony almost as a consumer product.



"A Korean groom cannot spare longer than 4.4 days to visit the bride's country because of pending work in his hometown and the high cost of international travel," Heo said, referring to a survey figure from the gender equality and family ministry. Marital partners wrap up everything within the tight schedule, from their first meeting to wedding and honeymoon, with the groom returning to Korea ahead of the bride.



Korean husbands, paying a brokerage fee of about 10 million won ($8,820), can complain about brokers to the Korea Consumer Agency, a government agency accepting consumer complaints, or Danuri Call Center, a multicultural family support portal run by the family ministry. The complaints are made at specials windows, where complainants are treated as if they are upset about a defective product.



Cross-border marriage brokerages, booming in the early 2000s, promoted women from different countries using racial epithets as if selling local products. One ad from a broker's site showed a chart titled "merits of brides from each country." The ad explained that Nepalese women were "beautiful" and had "untainted naivety," Vietnamese women were "tough" yet "devoted to husbands," and Uzbek women mostly had "high educational backgrounds and superb language skills."



Brokers sometimes did more than provide false information. In 2012, a Korean broker was sentenced to two years in jail for inspecting a Filipina woman's naked body to "check her virginity" at a lodge prepared by his agency in the Philippines, before marrying her to a Korean man.



So Ra-mi, a lawyer from human rights law foundation GongGam in Seoul, says in the public interest law guidebook "Migrant Law Study" that the outgoing brokerage practice derived from the "profit-driven nature of commercialized cross-border marriage brokerage that can nail the biggest bucks in the shortest time."



The problem was condemned in 2007 by the U.N.'s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. The organization urged the Korean government to step in and prevent brokerage malpractice, particularly misleading online ads.



Han Ga-eun, a Vietnamese director of the Women Migrants Human Rights Center, told The Korea Times she was mostly vexed about foreign victims of the bad brokers being ignored, violated and unrecognized by Koreans, including the women's in-laws.



Arguing that both sides of a cross-border married couple must try to level the playing field, Han said, "Many Koreans view marriage migrants through a limited framework of marriage, ignoring their personal identities."







'Multicultural' families



Korean law hardly makes it easy for marriage migrants to cope with their lives here. Although there are bills supporting Korea's ever-increasing multicultural families, their very definition of the family unit is, once carefully considered, advantageous to Korean husbands while unfair to foreign wives.



According to the 2008 multicultural family supporting bill introduced by the family ministry, multicultural households must comprise a "Korean citizen" and a "foreigner or naturalized Korean married to the Korean citizen."



The ministry's definition, according to Heo, excludes marriage migrants from outside Korea, ethnic Koreans from overseas who migrated to Korea, and migrant workers accepted through the state employment permit system (who account for the majority of foreigners in Korea). Multicultural families, in the Korean government's understanding, do not make sense without a Korean citizen.



For an existing multicultural household in Korea, foreign wives often find their immigration status threatened because it depends on their marital status. They must remain married here for two years to apply for naturalization, and before then their husbands must sponsor their visas. Separation deals a heavier blow to the migrants than Korean husbands because of the country's complex visa requirements for foreign divorcees.



Foreign wives wishing to divorce their Korean husbands are virtually giving up their future here, a critical issue for the migrants wishing to keep their immigration status or claim custody over children. In households where the husband wields control over his wife's immigration status, and sometimes abuses the authority to threaten the woman's security, spousal equality is farfetched.



The 2008 bill also does not support those whose immigration status expires. F-6 document holders who leave their Korean partners due to domestic violence and cannot extend the document's expiration date are outside the bill's protection, as are children born here between unregistered migrant workers.



The exclusion practice, according to So, goes against the U.N.'s Committee on the Rights of the Child, which campaigns for all children's rights to education, social participation and protection without discrimination based on their backgrounds.



"The Korean government's multicultural policies are hinged on supporting legal marriage migrants to assimilate to life in Korea," So said. "The process, however, carries a discrepancy that foreigners are somehow encouraged to hide their cultures and languages to absorb Korean culture better. The policies reflect nationalism, not multiculturalism."





Vietnamese women who married Korean men and are waiting for their F-6 marriage migrant visas attend a pre-departure orientation session offered by the United Nations Center for Human Rights at the Korean consulate in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. Korea Times