OSLO, Norway, May 6 (UPI) -- A report says that many Thai women who came to Norway as brides have been forced into prostitution.
The newspaper Aftenposten said that some of the women turned to prostitution when their husbands ended the marriages, while others were forced into it by their husbands.
"This is incredibly sad," Tove Smaadahl of the Norwegian Women's Crisis Secretariat told the newspaper VG this week. "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."
In one case, a husband allegedly forced his wife to prostitute herself for 10 years while she paid off his house and car. At the end of that time, he told her he refused to live with a "whore."
Because some of the woman's earnings had been sent to her family in Thailand, the husband could claim he had been helping support them, while she had no proof that she was the one who earned the money. She also lost her child.
The Institute of Community Medicine prepared the report, which says that the overwhelming majority of the 148 Asian women who turned to a support center for prostitutes last year were from Thailand.
