Oppressed, enslaved and brutalised: The women trafficked from North Korea into China’s sex trade Nicola Smith and Ben Farmer
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/oppressed-enslaved-brutalised-women-trafficked-north-korea-chinas/
Thousands of North Korean women and girls are being subjected to forced marriage, prostitution and sadistic abuse by trafficking gangs running a multi-million dollar illicit sex industry in China.
A report by the Korea Future Initiative (KFI), which will be presented in the House of Commons on Monday, forensically details how vulnerable women and girls as young as 12 are being tricked into escaping North Korea only to be sold as sex slaves in China.
The women ensnared by the gangs face the sickening choice of becoming sex slaves or being repatriated to the oppressive state where they face torture in bleak prison camps or possible execution.
The report – Sex Slaves: The Prostitution, Cybersex and Forced Marriage of North Korean Women and Girls in China – has been compiled by researchers who interviewed 45 women in China and South Korea over two years and will make difficult reading for MPs.
It reveals a widespread Chinese trade which plumbs the depths of human depravity.
One survivor reveals in stomach-churning detail how a girl forced into prostitution had been so brutalised that she could not stand.
“There is a house where women are taken before they are sold. When I arrived, there were many [North Korean] women, but also girls. One girl had her vagina and anus ripped apart. A woman told me there was nothing left: no skin, just a large hole,” said the survivor, named Ms Song.
“I was so shocked when I watched the girl crawl around the room and try to stand and lean on the wall. I could see where she had leaked fluids and there was blood on the floor. She was crying.”
A 14-year-old girl tells of how she had been sold for marriage for £2,740. Others describe being starved, imprisoned and abused live on camera in sordid cybersex dens that feed the world’s insatiable desire for online pornography.
“The man … drove me to his apartment. It was shocking to see [North Korean] girls there. I do not know how old they were. I saw two girls who had not yet developed breasts,” said a woman called Ms Choi.
“I was taken to a room that had a bed in front of a table with a computer and a webcam. Four men came [and] gang-raped me.”
Yoon Hee-soon, the report’s author and a researcher at KFI, a London-based not-for-profit that rescues North Koreans in danger, estimates that the exploitation of North Korean women and girls generates at least £82 million a year for the Chinese underworld.
“Commonly aged between 12-29 and overwhelmingly female, victims are coerced, sold, or abducted in China or trafficked directly from North Korea,” she said. “Many are sold more than once and are forced into at least one form of sexual slavery within a year of leaving their homeland.”
North Korean women are especially vulnerable to the vast transnational network of people traffickers and brokers who operate in the knowledge that their victims cannot turn to the Chinese police for help.
However, a pattern of exploiting and enslaving women and girls for sexual purposes has sprung up across the borders of almost all developing countries bordering or trading with China.
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