China's Human Trafficking

North Korean women forced into sex slavery in China
BBC News

The trade of North Korean women in China is said to be worth $100m a year for criminal organisations

Thousands of North Korean women and girls are being forced to work in the sex trade in China, according to a new report by a London-based rights group.
They are often abducted and sold as prostitutes, or compelled to marry Chinese men, says the Korea Future Initiative.
The trade is worth $100m (£79m) a year for criminal organisations, it says.
The women are often trapped because China repatriates North Koreans, who then face torture at home, it says.
"Victims are prostituted for as little as 30 Chinese yuan ($4.30; £3.40), sold as wives for just 1,000 yuan, and trafficked into cybersex dens for exploitation by a global online audience," the report's author Yoon Hee-soon said.
The girls and women in question are usually aged between 12 and 29, but can sometimes be younger, the report said.
They are coerced, sold, or abducted in China or trafficked directly from North Korea. 

Many are sold more than once and are forced into at least one form of sexual slavery within a year of leaving their homeland, it adds.
Many are enslaved in brothels in districts in north-east China with large migrant worker populations.
The girls -- some as young as nine -- and women working in the cybersex industry are forced to perform sex acts and are sexually assaulted in front of webcams. 

Many of the subscribers are thought to be South Korean.
Women forced into marriage were mostly sold in rural areas for 1,000 to 50,000 yuan, and were raped and abused by their husbands.
The group collected its information from victims in China and exiled survivors in South Korea.
One woman, named as Ms Pyon from Chongjin City, North Korea, is quoted as saying in the report:
"I was sold [to a brothel] with six other North Korean women at a hotel. We were not given much food and were treated badly... After eight months, half of us were sold again. The broker did bad things to me."

"When I arrived [at the new brothel] I had bruises on my body. [The broker] was beaten then stabbed in the legs by some members of the gang."
Another, Ms Kim, said: "There are many South Koreans [in Dalian, China]... We put advertising cards under their doors [in hotels]... The cards are in the Korean-language and advertise what we offer... We are mostly taken to bars [by the pimp].
"South Korean companies want [North Korean prostitutes] for their businessmen... Prostitution was my first experience of meeting a South Korean person."

North Korea Offers China Sex For Money

North Korean women help to meet the shortage of brides in China's male-dominated society.

By Steven W. Mosher 

Why are an estimated 85 percent of the North Koreans who manage to make their way to freedom in South Korea women?
And why do nearly all come by way of China, rather than across the heavily guarded DMZ, and have sad stories of sexual abuse to tell?
The backward North Korean economy produces very little that the world wants. 

But Big Brother China, however, is hungry for the two things Pyongyang does have in relative abundance: coal and women. 

The coal keeps the fires burning in energy-poor China. 

The women help to meet the shortage of brides in China's male-dominated society.
China's one-child policy has devastated the female population. 

Over the past three-and-a-half decades that the policy has been in place, tens of millions of girls have disappeared from the population. 

They were killed in utero by sex-selection abortions, at birth by female infanticide, or after birth by simple neglect.
Sex-selection abortion is the biggest offender. 

Almost ten million such abortions were carried out between the years 2000 and 2014. 

That works out to 1800 unborn girls eliminated every day, 640,000 eliminated each year, and six and half million each decade.
This targeting of unborn baby girls has so skewed the sex ratio at birth that there are now at least 115 boys born for every 100 girls.
The result is that women of marriageable age are in short supply. 

There are now an estimated 33 million men in China who cannot find brides -- at least inside of China. 

And so they look abroad.
The State Department's 2013 "Trafficking in Persons Report" acknowledged the connection, stating that "the Chinese government's birth control policy and a cultural preference for sons, create a skewed sex-ration of 118 boys to 100 girls in China, which served as a key source of demand for the trafficking of foreign women as brides for Chinese men and for forced prostitution."
One place that Chinese men look for brides is the other side of the Yalu River, for in North Korea there are lots of hungry young women longing for a better life. 

The population of Kim Jong Un's socialist paradise subsists in near famine conditions, with two in five North Koreans undernourished and more than two-thirds on food aid.
The latest United Nations report, published in March 2017, paints a grim picture: Out of a population of 24 million, "an estimated 18 million people are dependent on Government food rations while 10.5 million people are believed to be undernourished. A lack of access to basic services including water and sanitation, as well as a weak health infrastructure further threaten the well-being of the population, particularly young children and pregnant and breastfeeding women.
Even members of Kim's highly touted "one-million man army" are starving; witness the sick and malnourished defector who recently crawled across the DMZ to freedom.
As a result of this widespread and continuing food shortage, starving North Korea peasants are often happy to sell a teenaged daughter -- whom they would have trouble feeding in any event -- to agents who claim that they are recruiting workers for Chinese companies. 

"Your daughter will be given a job in a factory or restaurant," they promise the parents. 

"She will finally have enough to eat."
Older women are also lured across the border on the same promise.
But these "hiring agents" are actually sex traffickers, and what awaits the North Korean girls and women in China is not a real job but either forced marriage or out-and-out sexual slavery. 

Young girls, especially if they are virgins, are sold to the highest bidder as brides. 

Older women are generally sold to brothels where they are kept under lock and key and forced to work as prostitutes.
It is no wonder that many of them take flight at the first opportunity, paying "snakeheads"--illegal guides -- to lead them safely across China's southern border to Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. 

From there they can easily travel to South Korea and freedom.
“Historically, the largest influence in female migration from North Korea to China has been sex trafficking and marriages,” said Sokeel Park, the Seoul-based director of research and strategy for Liberty in North Korea, an organization that helps rescue North Korean refugees hiding in China.
Having found their way to freedom, few of these woman will go on record saying that they were forced into prostitution or sold as wives in China. 

But nearly all, as vulnerable women in a country with a superabundance of often predatory males, were sexually abused in some way.