The Comfort Women of Our Time: North Korean Women Are Turning to Prostitution to Survive

It shouldn’t be forgotten that Laura Ling and Euna Lee went to China to tell the story of what it means to be a North Korean woman today. What it means, increasingly, is having no future, and often, having no means to keep body and soul united but sacrificing the latter to preserve whatever remains of the former. If the historically weighty term “comfort woman” means a woman coerced into prostitution by the actions of an oppressive government, the women of North Korea are the comfort women of our time, and in these times, men and women in China and both Koreas are their exploiters, and often, their means of survival.

It would be an overstatement to suggest that the North Korean regime is directly impressing women into prostitution against their will, [Update: I stand corrected] but the regime’s actions, while less direct than those of the Japanese 60 years ago, frequently have the same ultimate effect. For an apt illustration, let’s return to the story of Ban Yong Mee:

Born in the town of Sinuiju, the city across the river from Dandong, Miss Ban studied hard at school to achieve her childhood dream of becoming a doctor. But despite getting excellent grades, a medical college refused her application on the grounds that she was from an ideologically “unreliable” family.

The problem was her grandfather, who had been a moderately prosperous businessman before the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. His fabrics factory employed only a few dozen people, yet in the eyes of North Korea’s communist leadership he was an exploiter, capitalist and counter-revolutionary threat.

His factory was confiscated, he was executed as a “public enemy”, and ever since, his descendants have been treated with suspicion – Miss Ban’s parents were forced to work on a cooperative farm.

Rejected from medical school, Miss Ban attempted to join the Korean People’s Army and was rejected for the same reason. “They said, ‘We don’t need a person who may betray us any moment and whom we can’t trust’,” she said with a sad smile. “They think that I want revenge for my grandfather.”

Instead, she had no choice but to join her parents, toiling in the co-operative’s rice fields. [London Telegraph]

Miss Ban became a victim of the North Korean regime’s system of political castes known as
songbun, meaning she was written off as unworthy and expendable. Some of the women in Miss Ban’s position say they were lured into Chinese brothels with false promises. Miss Ban makes no such claim. She admits knowingly selling herself to a brothel. There was simply no other alternative. Miss Ban was a subject of a nominally socialist regime that smothers private markets but which chooses to squander its resources on weapons and white elephants for the Inner Party rather than provide for its people, and which refuses to let other countries feed them, either:

“Most of us had absolutely nothing to eat,” she said, recalling the famines in the communist state that killed an estimated 300,000 people between 1995 and 1998. “We went to the hills to look for edible grass, wild animals and birds. I remember we even ate insects and caterpillars.” [London Telegraph]

Other North Korean women interviewed for this report, most likely having no idea of their own songbun status, simply claim that they were hungry — often because a provider died, leaving then no other means of support. A few others were targeted and abducted by the North Korean accomplices of Chinese gangs.

Like all North Korean refugees in China, Ms. Ban lived as a hunted fugitive under an unadjudged death sentence — the constant fear of being sent back to die in a North Korean gulag, or in front of a North Korean firing squad. One day, Chinese police caught her with fake documents. The price of Miss Ban’s survival was giving in to the sexual demands of six of the policemen and turning over all the earnings she had. And still, that was better than the alternative:

“The only way I’m going back to Korea is in a coffin,” she said, a look of defiance flashing across her face. “F*** you, comrade Kim Jong-il.”[London Telegraph]

Open News recently published several reports on the rising trend in this industry — forcing North Korean women to perform in front of web cams for South Korean customers hundreds of miles away. The South Korean partners in these ventures supply the Korean-Chinese pimps with South Korean national ID’s (presumably fake) for the North Korean women, so that they can chat online on South Korean web sites. According to Open News, the women don’t discuss where they come from, but the South Korean customers certainly recognize their North Korean dialects. Let it never be said that South Koreans never did anything for starving North Koreans, although there are things to be said for this commerce — it’s probably better than physical rape, and it’s still probably keeping more North Koreans alive than anything Kim Dae Jung or Roh Moo Hyun ever did for North Korea’s expendable classes. Here’s your “We Are One” feel-good moment of the year:

Mr. B told us that these chatting girls from North Korea have to do more than what is stated above because the more they work, the more money they can earn.

These chatting girls work usually around midnight. Because there are lots of customers after 6 pm, the work continues from 1 am to 4 am. There is no fixed time when the work will be done. It is also possible these women be driven by customer during the day.

Mr. A and Mr. B both said that these women are not free from supervision of the managers even after their work is done. They are confined 24 hours and not allowed to leave the building. Even if some are exceptionally allowed out, they will be accompanied with managers to be under their control. [Open News]

The women must meet earnings quotas or risk losing even this life, such as it is. But the earning potential is still phenomenal by North Korean standards:

These “North Korean refugee chatting girls” have a sales target (a mandatory minimum sales amount assigned by the employer) that must be met each day. The amount varies by employer; the lowest sales target is known to be 50,000 won (South Korean) per day, or 220,000 won per week.

According to Mr. A’s testimony, however, it is actually easy to earn a daily average of 100,000 won. Accordingly, it is easy to earn 500,000 won per week or 2 million won per month, in which case the chatting woman would receive an income (calculated as 30 percent of the sales revenue) of 600,000 won (approximately 4,000 yuan) (Note 1). Furthermore, the income is directly proportional to the duration of the chat; the longer the women draw out the chat, the higher their income. [Open News]

In North Korea itself, women and children are also being forced into prostitution by a deteriorating food situation and a state that won’t provide for them:

“Around stations in big cities, you can see many pimps affiliated to inns . . . . They approach pedestrians, euphemistically saying that “˜I am selling a bed,’ or “˜selling a flower.'” Sadly, some of those forced to survive this way are children. [Daily NK]

The beneficiaries of the majority’s misery are the minority with power and money. The Daily NK has previously reported on a prostitution scandal in which twenty North Korean officials in Hamhung were purged, and several senior military officers were shot for patronizing a “tea house.” This month, the Daily NK reports that in the city of Hyesan, the regime engaged in an inspection campaign directed at hotels that are selling women and girls to North Korean and foreign customers:

At the Hyemyung Inn, located in Hyemyung-dong, the superintendant, Mr. Lee, and the manager Mr. Baek allegedly ran a prostitution ring from 2005, despite the fact that it is a state-operated residential facility frequently used by Central Party officials. They charged 10,000 to 15,000 North Korean won per room for officials, and 4,000 won per room to average customers.

According to the source, prostitution at the Hyemyung Inn took place behind the disguise of flower sales. The superintendant and the manager connected male customers to various “flowers” according to their demands. What has been causing the most shock is the apparent coercion of girls as young as middle-school graduates into working at the inns.

The women selling flowers were classified into those selling “red flowers” (girls in their late teens~early 20s), “blue flowers” (unmarried women over 25), “yellow flowers” (married women) and “purple flowers” (widows). The superintendant was provided with the women through another supplier. These prostitutes divided payments for their services with the suppliers at a 40:60 or 50:50 ratio.

The source explained, “The most expensive ‘red flower’ costs around 20,000 won for two hours and 40,000 won for the entire night. It was even revealed that the supplier has good connections in China, so some of his women crossed the border and went as far as Changbai in China to work.” [Daily NK]

This time, different government actions are implicated in the rise of survival prostitution — the regime’s attack on the markets many North Koreans depend on to survive, and the mass mobilization that takes them away from the hard work of getting by day by day:

The source also explained, “Since the 150-Day Battle began, the number of women selling their bodies has progressively increased.” As households are being mobilized for farm labor and construction projects, and the markets are opening at past 4pm, the income of households in the cities has dramatically decreased, resulting in greater numbers of women engaging in sex trafficking as a means of survival. [Daily NK]

Take nothing I say here as a moral objection to voluntary commercial sex among free and consenting adults. Certainly there are greater social evils than this in North Korea today. Take this as an objection to an oligarchy that deprives human beings of their aspirations and their innate potential, and which forces them to choose between a degradation in a brothel or dessication in a grave.