Buying a bride to Thai the knot

IF WE allow TV sitcoms and Kim Kardashian to tell it, romance flies out the window once you get married.

But what if you’ve never been in the same room, never mind romantically involved, with the person you are saying “I do” to?

All over the world, there are women who would much rather say “I do not”. But because they are mail-order brides, they do not have a voice. Current TV’S excellent documentary, titled Bride Trafficking Unveiled, lifts the veil on this kind of life.

Bride trafficking truly brings a new meaning to “tying the knot”. That is, if the knot is placed snugly over the hands and feet of women from all over the globe.

Current TV journalist Laura Barry travels to Thailand and the Philippines to find out how women grow up in their fathers’ houses one day and then find themselves in the house of a man they don’t know, the next. She speaks to these women, their new husbands as well as the men who are gaining wads of cash because of this.

Barry’s interest was piqued when she was made aware that there had been an alarmingly high rate of foreign nationals coming into Ireland as Irish citizens’ wives. So she chose to investigate.

What she found was that there are quite a few loopholes in UK laws that draw very fuzzy lines between human trafficking and holy matrimony.

Surely, for women who enjoy the freedom of free will in this era, this sounds like an unquestioningly unbearable life. But every day there are females who have to endure it. Barry and her team want to find out how and why this still happens in today’s societies, and so do we. airs on Current TV (Top TV channel 406) today at 5pm.