Also Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/sex-trafficked-north-korea-sold-men-bridal-markets/
Jeong-Ah Kim and Hyeona Ji glance at one another, as they consider whether they would like to one day return to North Korea. The pair share a traumatic past: they both fled their home nation, only to be sold by sex traffickers in China.
“I would visit if Korea reunifies, but I won’t live there again,” Ji answers. Kim nods in agreement.
They are in London for the launch of a report from the Korea Future Initiative (KFI) that reveals how North Korean women and girls are being subjected to forced marriage, sadistic abuse and prostitution by multi-million dollar trafficking rings.
Kim, 43, and Ji, 40- who now live in South Korea - describe markets where Chinese men "shop" for brides; a fear of being repatriated by the Chinese authorities and sent back to North Korea, where they would face detention camps and potential execution; and separation from their children.
Regardless, for many women desperate to flee life in North Korea, being helped over the Chinese border by people they know could go on to sell them into forced marriage or sex trafficking, is a risk worth taking.
When we meet over lunch before they address the House of Commons, Kim and Ji appear calm. There is no evidence of their trauma, as they sip luke-warm water and speak slowly about the impossible choice they faced between forced marriage in China or internment – and possible death – in North Korea.
“The lesser of two evils is to stay in China in a forced relationship,” says Kim.
“I would say that around 90 per cent of North Korean defector women have similar – if not worse – experiences of human trafficking and forced repatriation,” she continues. Estimates suggest there could be between 150,000 and 250,000 North Korean defectors in China, many of whom are women who have been sex trafficked and are living in hiding.
Ji escaped from North Korea four times, the first time in 1998, after her father, who was originally from China, decided the family should seek a better life across the border (as many as 3.5 million North Koreans died between 1994 and 1998 because of famine).
Over the next decade, Ji was twice sold into forced marriages by the human traffickers who had helped her escape, and was three times caught by Chinese authorities who repatriated her. She was sent to a North Korean labour camp, where she survived by eating frogs and insects, and was given an abortion without anaesthetic. She was separated from her father, who she never saw again, as well as her mother and sister, who were also sex trafficked.
On her third attempt to return to China from North Korea, Ji was sold to a Chinese farmer for around Y30,000 (ÂŁ3,200). The prices for women are similar today and feed an underground economy that generates at least ÂŁ82 million a year, according to the KFI.
“North Korean women become a commercial product – merchandise for Chinese men to look at and pick depending on price,” says Ji. “I was forced to have relations with the men who bought me and had my rights taken away.
The problem, experts say, can be traced back to the gender imbalance in China – a result of the one-child policy (recently translated into a two-child policy) and a preference for boys, which means there are now 34 million more men than women in China.
Traffickers will usually calculate how many single men there are in a Chinese town and provide a corresponding number of women. These “brides” – who the traffickers describe as "pigs" and "dogs" in case their phone calls are being monitored by the authorities – can also hail from countries including Pakistan, Burma, Vietnam and Laos.
Kim describes how local men flocked to a marketplace in Shenyang, when she arrived with other “new women”. Chinese men sized them up, then chose a “bride” to take home.
“A whole bunch of men came to see what new North Korean women were brought into town,” she says. “I was sick, so I wasn’t that desirable to the Chinese men who came to shop for us defector women.” One man took pity on her and returned with medicine, before going on to buy her.
Like many North Korean women seeking a route out of their country, Kim knew that, when she asked traffickers for help crossing the border, she would likely be sold to a Chinese man when she reached the other side. “It was a way to guarantee a better survival than if I’d gone to China alone,” she says.
The threat Kim faced in leaving North Korea was significant: she had been a member of the Workers’ Party and an officer in the North Korean army. If she was caught or later repatriated, she would be executed. But in 2006, her abusive ex-husband in her home country beat her when she was pregnant with their second child and she miscarried; she needed to escape.
Kim had little family of her own to speak of – she was forcibly given up for adoption twice as a child and had watched her older brother die from starvation. Her in-laws were kind and insisted on looking after her daughter, now 18, so she left her behind.
“My in-laws were very loving, they really doted on her,” says Kim. “She would have a better life in North Korea than if she followed me to China, where I knew I would face danger.”
Women sold into forced marriages are forced to sleep with their husbands, made to do manual labour, and monitored whenever they leave the house. Kim says her new Chinese husband, a farmer, was a “kind man” and she had an "easier life" than many other female defectors. When he discovered she was pregnant with a child conceived when she had still been in North Korea, he agreed to raise it as his own.
But it wasn’t a happy "marriage".
“I had no freedom to roam outside the house,” says Kim. “After I gave birth I had a relatively easier life compared to other defector women, who had to do manual labour… but that’s not saying much.”
For the two years, nine months that Kim lived with her Chinese husband, she “felt the tragedy all around”. “I knew I couldn’t stay forever,” she says. “I had to leave China to escape the daily danger of being discovered by the authorities and repatriated.”
On one occasion, that almost happened. Soon after she arrived in China, she was arrested and detained by local authorities. “I resisted furiously,” she recalls. “I tried to commit suicide, because I couldn’t go back to North Korea.” Her new husband gathered enough money to bribe the police and promised them that he would raise her unborn child as his own if they let her stay.
In 2008, rumours started to swirl that Kim Jong Il was planning a visit to China. Kim, along with other North Korean defectors, worried that the state would crack down on them “as a present to the regime”.
Had she not escaped then, Kim is certain she would have been executed in North Korea. Ji can attest to the horrific conditions for those who are repatriated; she is one of 200 survivors of the notorious Jeungsan Re-education Centre in South Pyongyang, where some 2,000 women who had escaped to China were brutally treated.
Kim fled her husband alone and travelled hundreds of miles to Yangtze then Chengdu, where she connected with a South Korean missionary group who helped her escape through Myanmar to safety. The thing that “breaks [her] heart the most” is that she had to leave behind her second daughter, now 12. She hasn’t had contact with her daughter, but reporters who tracked her down told her she had said: “Didn’t Mummy discard me? She doesn’t care for me”.
“Chinese fathers usually tell their kids their mothers forgot about them when they fled to South Korea,” says Kim. “That’s yet another tragedy.”
Kim is now the founder and executive director of Tongil Mom, a non-governmental organisation that advocates for children left in China by North Korean defector mothers. She says children born to North Korean defectors are ostracised in the community and unable to go to school because they often don’t have official papers.
“When other kids find our their mothers have been repatriated to North Korea or left for South Korea, they target them with even more bullying,” she says. Around 70 per cent of the children in Chinese orphanages, she estimates, are North Korean children who have been kicked out by, or run away from, their fathers.
“The Chinese government is ignoring the situation, but it’s only going to get worse as these children get older,” says Kim. “The UK – as a member of the Security Council – should flex its muscles and stop China’s human rights violations against North Korean women and the children left behind.”
Ji and Kim are both now settled in South Korea, newly married and working as high profile activists. Ji has written a bestseller about her journey, called A Thousand Miles for Freedom and co-chairs the Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea. With the help of a missionary group, she was able to rescue her mother and sister from their forced marriages and bring them to South Korea, where she lives with her third husband and two children.
Kim, meanwhile, dreams that one day she can introduce her three children to one another (she had a third child with her husband in South Korea).
“What I, and other North Korean women, went through is trauma you can’t escape from,” says Kim. “Even though I’m living in freedom, I am separated from my kids and that pain will always be there.”