Chiang said her advice to abused foreign brides is to reach out and seek professional help from both public and private institutions.
The center's toll-free help line is 0800-024-995 and the national 24-hour hotline is 113.
Although the city's social affairs bureau also offers temporary shelters and benefits similar to those enjoyed by Taiwanese women to legal foreign brides, said Tso Cheng-cheng (左承誠), supervisor of the bureau's social worker division, adding that government support is still limited.
"One of the best ways to solve the problems of foreign brides is to stop treating them as commodities and seeing them as unpaid domestic maids," she said.
Social resources
In addition to public resources, many non-governmental organizations have been providing help to foreign brides.
The Good Shepherd Sisters Social Welfare Service Foundation (
The shelter's foreign residents moved in with different problems. Some of them married so they could get identification cards which would allow them to work, later discovering that their new husbands were convicts, drug addicts or alcoholics.
Others claimed they were treated as nothing more than reproductive tools.
Intervention
Although many problems can occur in interracial or intercultural marriages, some of them can be avoided in advance, said Sister Tang Jing-lien (湯靜蓮), the foundation's president.
"The broker, who plays a significant role in the match-making process, should assume more responsibility by checking the background of the potential groom and speaking with him to gain a better understanding of his personal habits and character," Tang said.
For those who decide to get married, Tang said the broker or the embassy should consider offering some sort of pre-marital counseling for future couples.
And when marriages end in the couple seeking divorce and subsequently having trouble taking care of their children, Tang would like to see the government step in.
Chuang Li-chuan (莊禮傳), executive-general of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation Taiwan (賽珍珠基金會), called on the government to crackdown on illegal brokers and encourage legal ones to provide language and pre-marital education programs.
"Language programs for foreign brides should be made compulsory and available at broker agencies or bushibans. Pre-marital education including inter-racial marriages and sex education are equally important," she said.
The government should also hold training courses so that the country might have more interpreters capable of speaking different languages. "One of the reasons that foreign brides don't ask for help is because they don't know how," she said.
Chuang added that she would like to see government agencies offer more help to foreign brides, and for law enforcement to take a more aggressive stance toward handling domestic violence cases that involve foreign brides.
"[The foreign brides] deserve the same basic rights as Taiwanese women. After all, they are citizens of the Republic of China and share the same responsibilities as any other Taiwanese woman," she said.
RSS