South Korea announced Wednesday that it would consult with ambassadors from seven Asian nations to help improve the quality of international marriages, local media said, following reports of foreign wives suffering abuse.
Seoul's Ministry of Gender Equality and Family said it would work with envoys from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, China,
Mongolia and Uzbekistan to find ways to promote positive international marriages and assist multicultural families.
Brokering international matches has become big business in South Korea as a growing number of the country's men living in rural areas seek foreign wives, because of a shortage of South Korean women willing to live in such regions.
Three-quarters of the some 33,000 international marriages in South Korea in 2009 involved South Korean men and foreign women, mostly from South-East Asian nations, according to Yonhap News Agency.
South Koreans seeking to marry a foreign national from one of the seven nations must also take a class on the culture and customs of their future spouse's country, the Ministry of Justice said earlier this week.
'We've selected these seven countries first, because of the demand for Korean citizenship from foreign spouses from them, and the high divorce rate from their Korean partners,' a Justice Ministry official told the Korea Times newspaper earlier this week.
The mandatory culture classes, which seek to improve South Koreans' understanding of their spouse's background, are expected to go into effect by the end of this month or in early February.
Domestic violence has emerged as an issue in some international matches, highlighted by an incident last July in which a newlywed mentally ill South Korean man stabbed his Vietnamese wife to death.
Concerns over possible human trafficking to create such matches also prompted Cambodia to impose a one-month ban in 2010 on marriages between South Korean nationals and Cambodians.
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