Daegu court gives Cambodian 4 years for killing husband.

From the Korea Times:

The Daegu District Court gave the unidentified woman, 18, a four-year sentence Thursday for stabbing her husband to death.

``She was pregnant, and we acknowledge that she used the knife to defend herself. But she stabbed him three times and the wounds showed that she attacked him consciously, so it was a preemptive attack rather than legitimate self-defense,'' the court said.

The woman came to Korea in April of last year to get married. The 38-year-old husband, under the influence of alcohol, attacked her at their home in Daegu in January.

In case you're curious, here's an excerpt from one of the contemporary articles, brought to us by Korea Beat:

“Cambodian people will think a person is rude for touching their heads. We do not know if that was the reason that 18-year old Mrs. Choun (pseudonym) stabbed her husband after marrying him from Cambodia.”

I ran it with the headline "Pay attention to your foreign wife owner's manual."

I'm not going to get into whether it was justified or not. Murder is murder, and besides, a 171-word article doesn't give you much to work with.

But what jumps out at me in stories like this---or when it's the mail-order bride who winds up dead---is the age gap, so telling of what's going on. When will South Korea stop buying young women in order to deal with its gender imbalance? Public relations people can talk about how the Korean Wave is touching the world and giving countries rich and poor a positive image of South Korea, but certainly people in Southeast Asia aren't getting as rosy a picture as hallyu enthusiasts might think. When you add the image of Koreans behaving badly overseas with bullshit like the wife trade, you're not building good relationships with your neighbors. Filling people with visions of palacial apartments, luxurious cars, and an exaggerated sense of filial piety won't do much when their countrywomen are sold to rural Korea, married to men who are too often poor or handicapped or otherwise unmarriable, and abused. These women are often unhappy, divorce rates among these international couples are on the rise, and we sometimes about the husbands trying to hunt down their wives after the women ran back to their home countries. In extreme cases these young women wind up dead. Sure, South Korea is one of the richest countries in the region now, but Korea itself is a great example of how quickly things can change.

Here's an excerpt from a Korea Times editorial from last August:

South Korea has increasingly come under attack for the abuse and exploitation of foreign wives, especially those from Southeast Asian countries. The plight of Vietnamese wives married to Koreans has already invited international criticism over rights abuses and human trafficking. It is heart-wrenching to read frequent stories that Vietnamese spouses were beaten to death or committed suicide ― far from realizing their ``Korean dream.''

What's more worrisome is that such a story does not stop with the ill-fated Vietnamese. The problem is now spreading to Cambodia. The Cambodian government has recently suspended processing all documents for marriages of its citizens with foreigners as a measure to minimize the possibility of human trafficking. You Ay, Cambodia's deputy minister of women's affairs, said April 3 that the suspension was prompted by concerns about exploitation and trafficking amid a surge in the number of Cambodian women marrying South Koreans.

And a Joongang Ilbo column from a while ago named "End the marriage industry":

A country is globally rejected or respected for its policies and behavior towards women. Korea must legislate against the business of buying and selling foreign wives.
The government should immediately crack down on this shameful practice.
At the same time, the government must grant quick citizenship to the foreign wives already living here so that they can have full equal rights under the law.
It is time for Korea to protect its minority citizens.

And while Korea is buying up the young women of Southeast Asia---41% of men in farming and fisheries do it, and one source says 37% of marriages in Jeollanam-do's Hampyeong county were international in 2004---foreign men in relationships with Korean women are still getting shit.

Just so we're clear about where I stand, allow me to quote myself from April:

For what it's worth, I don't object to these sort of marriages out of hand. For people who want to get married but find themselves with few options---or who simply find themselves tired of looking---I don't see anything wrong with finding someone through the internet or going through an agency. We've all tried internet dating, haven't we? (Haven't we?) And, hell, Korea and other Asian countries where this sort of international marriage business is popular have a long---and recent---history with matchmaking services. I'm also not naive enough to believe these women are all innocent victims, who didn't come here for money or the chance to live out the "Korean Dream." It says so right in the damn article. But I find it sick that these foreign women are little more than indentured servants, tied to men twice their age and half their IQ, and charged with repopulating a rural Korea that a generation or two before would have thrown them down a well.