Diners Club Offers Payment Plan for Vietnamese Brides

by Amanda Kloer · 2009-06-05 07:43:00 UTC
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Editor's note: This story has been updated since Diners Club contacted us stating that they were ending their relationship with Vietnam Brides International. Please see the updated story here.

Buying things with a credit card is easy.  You just swipe the card, take home the vacuum or flat screen or Fendi bag and pay it off slowly.  Buying a Vietnamese wife, however, is a lot harder.  You have to pay all that money up front.  Well, not anymore says Diners Club credit company!  They're offering a special deal: buy your very own Vietnamese woman for only $167 per month, interest free.  Diners Club International is financing exploitation.

Vietnam Brides International has teamed up with Diners Club to offer a payment plan for the women they sell, the first such partnership that I know of.  It's basically a layaway plan for human beings, except you get the "product" before you even make the first payment.  And when I thought it was not possible for these two companies to objectify and dehumanize these women any more, I read what the Assistant General Manager of Diners Club Singapore had to say about situations where the buyer defaults on his bride payments,

'We won't take back the bride if the customer defaults on payments. It's not like a hire purchase where we take back the product if the customer doesn't pay up by the due date...If the customers still don't repay, we'll have other ways to recover the debt.'

These are women, not Volkswagens!  You can't talk about whether or not to repo people!  And I'm petrified to find out what the "other ways to recover the debt" are; I'm sure they would not bode well for the bride or her buyer.  Diners Club, human beings should not be bought or sold, and they certainly shouldn't be part of a payment plan, a "blue light special", or a clearance sale.  Women are not commdities for you to finance.

Mail order brides are legal in most of the world, but they are extremely vulnerable to human trafficking,  domestic violence, abuse, rape, and exploitation.  While creating a payment plan to purchase a human being is an ethical outrage, it also reduces the economic barrier to buying a bride.  Removing that barrier allows traffickers to acquire women using less capital than they needed before.  It opens the door to even more criminals to buy and exploit these women.

Send a letter to Diners Club and tell them to stop setting up credit card payment plans for men to buy women!

Amanda Kloer is a Change.org Editor and has been a full-time abolitionist in several capacities for seven years. Follow her on Twitter @endhumantraffic
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