NGOs to launch campaign against ads offering Vietnamese women for marriage

　A banner advertising Vietnamese women for marriage. Ryu Yu-jong

"Marry a Vietnamese woman!"

In South Korean newspapers or on bulletin boards in the countryside, lines like the one above front notices offering local men the opportunity to meet Vietnamese women for the purpose of marriage. Reasons for the more frequent appearance of such ads include South Korea’s declining birth rate, the urban flight of many women of marriage age, a loosening of social stigma regarding marriage outside of race, and, due to the long-unspoken proclivity for women to go to extreme measures to ensure a son, an uneven male-female population ratio that is only now evening.

Civic groups, however, call the advertisements an insult to Vietnamese women, saying they offer them up as a commercial commodity. Groups such as Nawauri, the Unni Network, and the Public Interest Lawyer’s Network said they will launch a campaign against the notices by opening pages at popular Internet portal sites such as Naver and Happybean, in order to publicize what they call the "marriage-for-purchase" problem.

So La-mi of the lawyer’s network said, "We will collect photos taken by citizens [of such advertisements] and gather signatures of supporters of this campaign. We will then submit a petition to the National Human Rights Commission of Korea and urge all local governments to step up their administrative efforts to eradicate such advertisements." The groups’ online campaign can be found under the event page, "Be a well-intentioned paparazzi," to be accessible from June 16 until July 4.

The groups are inviting people to post photos of the advertisements, along with their impressions of them. The groups said they would conduct interviews with Vietnamese wome residing in South Korea to solidify their cause.