New Book Highlights Stories from Modern Day Korean Comfort Women in China

The modern day comfort women crisis of sexually exploited North Korean women in China continues and hopefully this new book will help draw a focus on it:

Every year, an unspecified number of North Koreans risk their lives for the chance of a better life outside the impoverished nation. They secretly cross the border to arrive in China, hoping to go to a third country for a new life free of fear and starvation. If caught, they must pay the price: they may be executed or sent to labor camps notorious for their appalling human rights conditions.

For some, particularly women, their audacious decisions to escape to China are based on false promises. They are lured by human traffickers to cross the border for “jobs.” 

Once arriving in China, their lives are no longer under their control. They may be raped by traffickers, who are Chinese or ethnic Koreans who were born and raised in China, before they are sold to poor, older Chinese farmers. Some are forced into prostitution or to perform online pornography. Scared by death threats or potential harm to their family members left behind in the North, they find it impossible to end the sexual bondage by themselves.

Sylvia Yu Friedman, an award-winning filmmaker and investigative journalist who chronicled this modern-day sexual slavery in Asia in a documentary series, raised fresh worries about the ramifications of such enslavement: the traumas of victims’ lives are passed down onto their children.  

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but Friedman has written a book documenting the stories of the sex trafficking going on in China. I wonder if this quote in the Korea Times article will cause her to be sued and her book banned in Korea for providing a balanced history:

“It’s a wicked cycle repeating in a way, since Korean women were dragged as wianbu or comfort women to China and all over the Asia Pacific on the frontlines of war to comfort the Japanese soldiers before and during World War II,” she said. “There were Korean brokers and collaborators involved in recruiting young Korean women as comfort women and the same type of opportunists today deceive and lure vulnerable North Korean women into bride trafficking and online pornography in China.”

I don’t expect many activists to help these modern day comfort women because there is more money to be made in attacking the Imperial Japanese’s comfort women system from over 75 years ago.