Like a good marriage, a proposed bill to protect foreign mail-order brides from potentially dangerous husbands is worth the effort and wait.
The rest of the country appears to be catching on to a problem we know about all too well in this state, especially in Snohomish County. Sen. Maria Cantwell and Rep. Rick Larsen are working to get the necessary backing to push the bill along.
The murder of Anastasia King in 2000 at the hands of her husband, Indle King Jr., and another man, raised our awareness about the dangers faced by mail-order brides, as they are typically called. In 1995 we suffered the terrifying killing of Susana Blackwell, her unborn baby and two friends at the King County Courthouse where Blackwell – a mail-order bride from the Philippines – sought a divorce from her husband, Timothy Blackwell.
Despite the stigma attached to such arrangements, these women do not come to this country as slaves of the men they marry. This bill would provide important information to women who likely have no other means to obtain such details – specifically, whether their potential husband has a criminal background. All of that information would be made available in the potential bride-to-be’s own language.
Indle King Jr. had already been married and divorced from another mail-order bride who sought a protective order against him, before he married Anastasia. He was already hunting for a third foreign wife while still married to Anastasia.
Data showing what’s really going on in these mail-order marriages is lacking. About 4,000 to 6,000 such marriages take place every year, according to statistics that date back to 1998. That number has likely increased. For some, it might be easy to label these women as merely looking for a free ticket into the United States – pretending to love their new husbands only to divorce them later on. With the divorce rate at 50 percent for the rest of us, who are we to judge? Besides, whatever the situation in any marriage, violence is never an acceptable option for resolving conflict or disappointment.
The chances of this bill becoming law this session are slim and our representatives understand that. Still, they’re encouraged, and we should be too, that the measure’s chances of being introduced again next year are good.
Many laws seem to complicate our lives and produce more red tape to get caught up in. This law provides foreign women the information they need to make one of the most important decisions in their lives.
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