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The trafficking of North Korean women along the Chinese-North Korean border, captured on film by the Chosun Ilbo, is hard to bear with open eyes. A 25-year-old daughter of a North Korean family, whose father had died of hunger and whose mother is blind was sold as a concubine for a Chinese man across the Duman or Tumen River to repay 50 percent of a debt worth 300 kg of grain. The price of the grain is just W46,000 (US$1=W947), which is less than the price of a dog in South Korea.
Something like this is probably happening somewhere along the Duman River tonight. There are an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 North Korean defectors hiding in China at present. Between 70 to 80 percent of them are women, and most of them have been trafficked into China for a price.
The North Korean women who are sold have not even W46,000 worth of human rights. Because of their Achilles heel of being a North Korean defector, they have no place to turn to if they are raped and abused. Reportedly these women are habitually raped by human traffickers or Chinese police. North Korean women sold into Chinese farms live like animals, beaten and sexually abused by their Chinese husbands. In many instances North Korean women have to please all of the men in a Chinese household just to get food. Some Chinese men sell the women to their neighbors. A few years ago, South Korean television depicted a North Korean woman who ended up working in a brothel after having been sold from one broker to another. The woman¡¯s face was a mask of pain.
Yet the North Korean women say all that is better than being sent back to North Korea. In the North, where strong remnants of the feudal society have created pervasive discrimination against women, women who are captured defecting or deported by China are forced to learn in police custody that they are not human beings through a regime of verbal abuse. This is the uniform testimony of people who experienced such punishment.
Women who come from the families of high-ranking North Korean officials or from households that earn foreign currency revenues live lives that are said to be even more comfortable than those of South Korean women. These are the women who filled the aisles at the recent New York Philharmonic¡¯s concert in Pyongyang. But the vast majority of North Korean women have to resort to hard labor to feed their families in a country whose economy has collapsed, on top of taking care of all household chores. Surveys of North Korean defectors show 90 percent of women who live in these circumstances have experienced physical abuse in their households. One female North Korean defector said she first found out about love by watching a South Korean movie in China.
The frozen body of a female North Korean defector, left in the open for more than two months, symbolizes the pain suffered by women there. How much longer must we sit and watch these women live such horrific lives in North Korea and be sold off for just W46,000?
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