By Alastair McIndoe /Manila
With the red tape nearly completed, newly-married Monica Alcantara from the Philippines is set to join her husband in Australia in a few weeks. They met on an Internet dating site two years ago, and romance blossomed over the webcam.
“He was always so respectful online,” recalled the vivacious 40-year-old of their cyberdates, held an ocean apart.
She was married before to a Filipino who left her after finding a job in the Middle East.
Her Australian husband is 24 years her senior and they had met four times in the Philippines before marrying in Manila earlier this year. He then returned to his hometown in western Australia while her visa was being processed.
International cyberspace romances via social networking and dating sites are spurring a surge in Filipinas marrying foreigners, according to the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO), an agency under the president’s office.
There has been a threefold rise in Filipinos migrating for marriage over the past 20 years. Some 23,927 Filipino spouses, overwhelmingly women, went through the CFO’s predeparture registration programme in 2007, the latest year for which figures are available. The commission believes the numbers dipped slightly last year and this year because of the global recession, but will pick up strongly again.
South Koreans - often in advanced middle-age from rural areas - are leading the rise in the marriages of foreigners to Filipinas.
For many Filipino women, marrying a foreigner - and typically a far older one - from a wealthy country is a hard-nosed decision to seek a secure economic future for herself and her family.
The CFO believes widening access to the Internet has been a key factor in the recent phenomenon.
And with seven of the top 10 nationalities for foreign spouses coming from either English-speaking countries or those with a high standard of English comprehension, communication is not a problem for the Filipinos.
Filipino spouses of foreign nationals have to attend a counselling and guidance programme run by the CFO, which looks for signs of mail-order brides, as part of the Philippines’ anti-human trafficking effort.
Matching Filipinas to foreigners as a business in the Philippines is banned under an ineffective 1990 law hobbled by - among other things - the reluctance of witnesses to testify in criminal cases and the hazy jurisdiction of cyberspace. “We’re drafting a Bill to amend the law to bring it up to date,” said CFO emigrant services officer Cherry Veniles.
The rise in websites operating “show-up” tours to the Philippines for foreigners to choose brides is a particular area of concern for the CFO.
“Meet the beautiful exotic women of the Philippines...where age is a plus for men, Philippine women look at older men as more desirable,” is the pitch of one American matchmaking website organising tours to the Philippines and countries in the former eastern bloc. It charges $1,795 for a seven-day tour to Cebu.
The commission estimates that one in 10 of its “clients” is a mail-order bride. “Five years ago, the average age was 26 to 35 years; now it is more 20 to 25,” said Veniles. She attributes much of that trend to the influence of the Internet.
While there are plenty of stories of abused Filipino brides, CFO counsellors admit there are happy endings too.
And as one blogger put it: “If the goal is to stop marriages between Western men and Filipinas who meet over the Internet, you might as well forget it. Globalisation is here and you cannot stop it.” — ANN
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