Like in a similar report from Sweden recently where the Thai embassy warned Thai women of Swedish men, increasing numbers of women from Thailand marrying Norwegians and moving to Norway, are ending up dumped or forced into prostitution, reports newspaper Aftenposten.
“This is incredibly sad,” Tove Smaadahl of the Norwegian Women’s Crisis Secretariat told newspaper VG in May. “There are many Thai women who come to us. We see that many of them have never learned Norwegian, and that prostitution is their only means of support.”
Many of the Thai women showing up at local crisis centres have been subjected to abuse, both physical and psychological, by their Norwegian husbands. One woman, who moved to Norway to be with the man she married, was shocked to find that he’d turned one of the rooms in his house into a bordello where he expected her to work.
The exploitation of these women has recently been documented in a report by Ellen Kristvik at the Institute for Community Medicine and the University of Oslo. The report was commissioned by the state ministry for townships.
Figures from Norway’s foreign ministry indicate that 935 women from Thailand moved to Norway in 2004 after marrying Norwegian men. Of the 153 Asian women who sought help at Oslo PRO-Centre last year, which offers support for prostitutes, fully 148 were from Thailand.
