Age limit on foreign men marrying Cambodian women introduced

27 thoughts on Age limit on foreign men marrying Cambodian women introduced

1. I hope this helps them. The income requirement is a little off-putting, and the age requirement seems a little too strict (what if the women is 50?) but sometimes sexism requires imperfect stopgap solutions for prevent the worst of it. I’m sure the Cambodian government knows better than me what the situation is, and I hope these new regulations help.

2. Hmmm….I’m not too sure about this. This could just force more women to go to mail order bride agencies where they have to go abroad to get married which doesn’t protect them from traffiking or abuse. Which already happens. Anding If the guy is raking in that much money, he might as well just fly her to his country regardless.

   What it will probably affect the ladies who get married to the foreign guys in Cambodia, the husband leaves and then the ladies stay behind with her Cambodian man friend.

3. I can see an argument for the age rule, but why the income one? If anything, encouraging what is likely a greater income and/or social class disparity increases the risk of trafficking.

   1. Yeah, I’m concerned, too.

4. This is age and class discrimination and wrong.

5. I think it’s better to just provide an age difference limit. I mean, a man can be 49 and still be marrying a young Chinese woman for exploitative reasons. And as others have said, what if the woman herself is over 50? It just seems like a band-aid on an open wound for me; it’s not solving the real problem. Get rid of the power structure that allows this shit to happen!

   But I don’t have a problem with the fact that this is supposedly “ageist.” Ageism is not like other oppressions. There ARE, generally speaking, differences between a person who has been on the Earth for 50 years and one who has only been here for only 20. So a relationship between a 50-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman is, nine times out of ten, going to be an unequal one, as the power difference in terms of their ages (since the former generally has way, way, WAY more life experience) is compounded by the power difference between men and women created by a sexist, patriarchal society. And chances are, if a man is seeking out relationships with much younger women (as opposed to where it just so happens that two people of disparate ages are perfect for each other, but that’s not necessarily what either planned), he knows this, and that unequal relationship is what he wants. It’s also usually the case that he’s the one operating with ageist attitudes about the attractiveness of women his own age.

   So calling out young women or the people protecting them as “ageist” is going after the wrong person. Sorry, but age really isn’t just a number. Maybe it’s a social construct, but it’s one with a lot of power behind it in this society, just like any other.

6. That being said, I agree wholeheartedly with the income requirement being unnecessary.

7. I doubt this will protect them. Someone who is already trafficking women will have a pretty high (laundered) income anyways. I think they’d be better off letting some lonely guy with a median income on e-harmony get an opportunity to meet a woman from their country.

8. I can kind of get the age rule, although maybe making a rule that the foreign dude can only be a certain number of years older than the woman makes more sense. I mean, what if she’s in her 40s or 50s herself? That’s certainly not an eyebrow-raising number.

   The income thing doesn’t make sense though. If anything, it’s just making it more likely that the foreign guy IS paying for her. Not that it’s impossible, but a guy of more modest means seems more likely not to have been able to afford to. I don’t know what the going rate these days on wife/slaves, but I imagine it would be more likely for a rich guy to have the cash to spare.

   What about a requirement that the man has to have spent a certain amount of time in-country first instead of an income requirement?

9. I am not so sure about either rule, as it does not consider the age or wealth of the bride. Also, encouraging wealthy foreign men to marry Cambodian women who are most likely far, far poorer perpetuates rigid gender roles and relationships based on transactions and not mutual aid, respect, admiration and love.

   Although I am not sure that the half your age plus seven rule should be inserted into Cambodian law, it would make more sense than mandating every husband be under 50.

10. From the article this is about esthetic’s and not any concern of trafficking. How is an average, young hothead safer and less exploitive than a rich, old man? Seems the richer older man is risking more and likely to care for her better. And who is the state or any busybody to say who can’t marry who, this is violation of a basic human right to marry who we choose.

    Besides being wrong headed it is also not enforcible so this is just an opportunity for bribe money.

11. I’m mulling this over while I think what I want to say about it in a full post, but my first reaction is “interesting, innovative, but is it effective?” I like the intent, though, mostly, though there might be a bit of “we want our young women for us” proprietary stuff going on rather than more protective.

12. It appears that South Korea is a big “importing” country. In 2010, Cambodia’s government banned Cambodian women from marrying South Korean men.

    “In March 2008, Cambodia imposed an eight-month ban on all foreign marriages to combat human trafficking after the release of an IOM report that found that as many as 1,759 marriage visas were issued to Cambodians by South Korea in 2007, up from only 72 in 2004.”

    1,759 still does not seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things.

    As to the situation in South Korea-

    “In 2005, 14% of all marriages in South Korea were marriages to foreigners (about 26,000 marriages); most were Korean men marrying other Asians. Korean men in age brackets up to their 40s outnumber slightly younger Korean women, both due to a high sex ratio and the drop in the birth rate since the 1960s, leading to a huge demand for foreign wives. Many Korean agencies encourage ‘international’ marriages to Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, and Thai women, adding a new degree of complexity to the issue of ethnicity”

    My cousin is one of these women, she is married to a South Korean man who she met in Japan. The only long term solution is to restore the sex ratio at birth to normal levels.

13. Wow, that seems incredibly patriarchal to me. My first reaction upon reading the article was an overwhelming impression of “they’re OUR women”. Um ….

    I don’t know how many people caught this 2010 New York Times article about Thai women who marry wealthy American men. Snip:

    UDON, THAILAND — The most dazzling creatures Nui Davis saw when she was a child were the village girls who had found foreign husbands, visiting in their Western finery and handing out candies to the children.

    “For me, they were like a princess,” she said. “And I kept those pictures in my mind, and I made a wish that one day I would like to be one of those ladies.”

    Today, at the age of 30, she lives with her husband, Joseph Davis of Fresno, California, in an air-conditioned, three-bedroom house with a driveway and basketball hoop, surrounded by flower beds and a well-kept lawn.

    “My family keeps saying, ‘You got it. You got your dream now,”’ she said.

    But unlike many other foreign husbands, Mr. Davis, 54, did not take his wife home with him, choosing instead to settle down in northeastern Thailand, a region known as Isaan.

    He is part of an expanding population of nearly 11,000 foreign husbands in the region, drawn by the low cost of living, slow pace of life and the exotic reputation of Thai women — something like a brand name for Western men seeking Asian partners. “Thai women are a lot like women in America were 50 years ago,” said Mr. Davis, before they discovered their rights and became “strong-headed and opinionated.”

    Granted, Mr. Davis sounds like a person I personally kind of want to punch in the face. And there are potential abuse issues in any marriage with a strong power disparity. But this particular wife doesn’t sound unhappy.

    As frequently happens, it sounds to me like this Cambodian law is just another instance where the idea of “trafficking” is used to bolster a controlling moral crusade, with little regard for the actual consent of the women involved.

14. Foreigners who earn less than $2,580 per month are also barred from wedding local women, foreign ministry spokesman Koy Kuong told AFP, but the restrictions do not apply to weddings taking place overseas.

    Oh, good, so now exploiting women is limited to the wealthy foreigners, rather than the poor ones.

    ??

    I mean, not to nitpick, but…

15. Ugh. Considering this is aimed at men twice the age of their brides buying wives, I’m not particularly off-put. And really, $2500/mo? That’s like $30k/year. I’m sorry, if you earn $13/hr, you should not be buying a bride slave. Get some priories.

16. Whoah. That’s just… not going to work.

17. Here in South Korea there have been some problems with older rural men using marriage companies to find wives from other less affluent Asian countries. In some cases there have been incidents of these wives being abused, and in one case murdered, by her Korean husband. The Korean government has mandated that all Korean men marrying foreign women must take “cultural education” classes to learn about the cultures of their prospective brides. However, there are only certain countries for which these culture classes are necessary: Cambodia, China, Mongolia, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. It seems that most of the men looking for foreign wives are on the low end of the Korean socioeconomic ladder, but that still puts them in a higher income bracket than the women they are marrying. Here is an article about the cultural classes men must now take: http://asiancorrespondent.com/49709/korean-men-must-take-a-class-before-taking-a-foreign-bride/

18. If true, I found the measure:

    1. Sexist agains women that get ban too marry whom they like.
    2. Sexist agains men. With a live expectancy above 70 years in many countries this is telling divorced and widows that they don’t have a right to rebuild their love live if male.
    3. Ageist in a lovely normative way: Dirty old man vs powerful Sex of the older women.
    4. Ineffective. Not only old men are sexist pigs, a lot of men on their 40s or less are sexist too.
    5. Sorry, but a 25+ year old women is old enough to decide I she want’s to mary a men on their 50s Like president Obama will be next year by the way.

    Even so this will help some people:
    1. Older local men that know will not have the challenge of foreign men any longer.

    2. An “Older men hating” set that will see their will imposed.

    3. Some old men that get exploited by unscrupulous females.

    4. Actual traffickers of women: The young women searching for an escape of an unjust or even violent situation will travel abroad and will loose their support networks.

    From my point of view, I don’t see a lot of gains for women. Frankly, just because something hurts men don’t imply that it will help women. To me this is case to point out.

19. banisteriopsis: And really, $2500/mo? That’s like $30k/year. I’m sorry, if you earn $13/hr, you should not be buying a bride slave. Get some priories.

    So, to be clear, I’m anti-human trafficking. That said, I want to point out that 30K a year in most countries in the world is a shit-ton.

20. Oo, limiting women’s right to decide about their own bodies. For their own protection, of course.

21. This is the worst idea ever. If you’re trapped in a miserable marriage with an exploitative old man you don’t like, the only difference between a 50 year old and a 70 year old is that with the latter, you can hang onto the hope of widowhood coming sooner rather than later. All this does is take away that hope.

22. I hope they wouldn’t have considered it, if it weren’t a bandaid over a bullet wound kind of problem.

    I don’t know if it will assist trafficking entirely, cons can just as easily encourage women to leave Cambodia for work or any number of false pretenses. I imagine this addresses a particular kind of trafficking scam? I don’t want to criticise the decision without a better understanding of anti-trafficking efforts in Cambodia.

    Whether or not they keep it, at least this is a sign that trafficking is being recognised as a problem. Hopefully the solutions will be considered and refined.

23. Utterly pointless. Slavers (I refuse to use bloodless terms that insulate people from reality) will have no problem hiring younger intermediaries to work with them. All this does is cut into their profit margin by a tiny little bit.

24. I would love to hear the actual logic stream behind this, because I totally hear “STOP STEALING OUR WIMMINS!” behind all the concern trolling. >_<

25. I’ve spent some time in Cambodia, and in that time i saw a lot of disturbing behaviors in regards to foreign men’s treatment and views of Cambodian women, and also held a very predatory aspect.This legislation however totally misses the mark and limits further the already limited choices of Cambodian women.

    Instead of ‘protecting’ women from older, less wealthy men, how about the government spends the time and money working on empowering women through employment opportunities and equal pay?

    The ‘supply’ of women willing to marry foreigners in order to obtain some semblance of economic security will not be affected by the age or socio-economic quality of potential husbands, but on their capacity to be financially stable independent of men, be they foreign or local.

    Age does affect the power relations within a marriage, however it is not the determining factor in how well a woman will be treated in her marriage. As long as men continue to feel that their economic, social and gender privilege makes them somehow entitled to a woman playing a traditional ‘wife’ role adverse power relations will exist. Sex trafficking is sex trafficking whether the woman inhabits a 10 bedroom house with a young man or a one bedroom flat with an older man. At the end of the day a gilded cage is still a cage.

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