... in response to Re: Take a GOOD LOOK at that PHOTO, posted by wsbill on Jul 8, 2003Encounters International, a Maryland-based service, charges men $1,850 for access to addresses and phone numbers of several hundred women in the former Soviet Union.
The agency's founder, Russian-born Natasha Spivack, said she had no objection to mandatory background checks, but predicted that abusive men would still find ways to get a foreign wife.
Spivack contended that male clients, not the women, are the most likely to be victimized in mail-order marriages. Some women, she said, enter such marriages solely to gain U.S. citizenship, then falsely complain of physical abuse as a ploy to remain in America despite divorce. "Some of these women are sharks,'' she said.
Spivack says she has helped arrange 300 marriages since 1993, with roughly 90 percent of them still intact.
Svetlana said she knows of several women from the former Soviet Union whose brokered marriages failed because of personal differences but none who were physically abused. Her husband, a twice-divorced pilot, said he assumed some foreign brides are mistreated but doubted the problem is widespread. "A guy is not going to grab a young woman in Russia to bring here just to beat up,'' he said. "He's got a lot of money tied up in it.''
Advocates for immigrant women's rights acknowledge that statistics are scarce on abuse of mail-order brides, but they are convinced the problem is growing. "We called legal service providers that help battered immigrant women -- half of these organizations said they have women coming through their doors who were married through international marriage brokers,'' said Layli Miller-Muro, executive director the Tahirih Justice Center in Falls Church, Virginia.
The center has been deeply involved in work on the upcoming bill. It also is assisting a Ukrainian woman who sued Encounters International, claiming the agency suggested she would be deported if she left her abusive husband. "Our goal is not to shut the marriage agencies down. It's to protect women,'' Miller-Muro said. "When someone is marketing relationships that by design involve a dominant party and subservient party, the likelihood of violence is greater.''
