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Q: Slave trade is still alive and well

Long read but worth it.
How a North Korean defector sold into the Chinese sex trade escaped to save her life

By CNN

1:31pm Jun 10, 2019

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North Korea defectors living in Sydney

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Wearing big black headphones and sitting on a blue floral bedspread, North Korean defector Lee Yumi was video chatting with yet another stranger online, dark rings shading the pale skin under her eyes.

For five years, Lee - whose name has been changed for her safety - says she had been imprisoned with a handful of other girls in a tiny apartment in northeast China, after the broker she trusted to plan her escape from North Korea sold her to a cybersex operator.

Her captor allowed her to leave the apartment once every six months. Attempts to escape had failed.

Two women who fled North Korea only to be tricked and sold into the Chinese sex trade have detailed their daring escape after five years of imprisonment. (Julie Zaugg)

Lee's story is shared by thousands of North Korean girls and women, some as young as nine years old, who are being abducted or trafficked to work in China's multimillion-dollar sex trade, according to a report by the London-based non-profit organisation Korea Future Initiative (KFI).

North Korean women are often enslaved in brothels, sold into repressive marriages or made to perform graphic acts in front of webcams in satellite towns near cities close to China's border with North Korea, the KFI found.

If caught by the Chinese authorities, they face repatriation to North Korea where defectors are often tortured. CNN was not able to independently verify claims made in the report.

Lee, however, had just found a lifeline. The stranger the 28-year-old was talking to online was not a cybersex customer. He was a South Korean pastor - and he had promised to save her.

South Korean pastor Chun Ki-Won is one of a band of Korean pastors who specialise in helping North Korean women escape from China. (CNN)

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Escape from North Korea

There are no official statistics showing exactly how many North Koreans have fled their country, which is home to about 25 million people.

South Korea says it has welcomed more than 32,000 defectors since 1998. Last year alone, the country received 1137 defectors - and 85 per cent of them were women.

"It is much easier for them to flee, because they are not usually enrolled in formal employment at a factory or a state firm where any absence would be immediately reported," said Yeo Sang Yoon, from the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, an NGO in Seoul.

"They are in charge of the household and can thus slip away unnoticed."

Lee grew up in a family of low-level party cadres in North Korea.

Thousands of North Korean girls and women, some as young as nine years old, are being abducted or trafficked to work in China's multimillion-dollar sex trade. (CNN)

"We had enough food," she said.

"We even had rice and wheat stored in the garage."

But Lee felt her parents were too strict. "I had to be home before sundown, and they didn't allow me to study medicine."

One day, after getting into a fight with them, she decided to cross the border into China. Lee said she found a broker to facilitate the dangerous move who promised her a job in a restaurant.

That promise turned out to be a lie.

Usually, women like Lee pay brokers $500 to $1000 to organise their safe passage to China, according to NGOs and defector accounts.

To reach China, many defectors cross the Tumen River that separates North Korea from China on foot at night, sometimes in freezing weather with the water coming up to their shoulders.

After Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011, border security was tightened to avoid the bad publicity associated with defections and prevent information about North Korea trickling into the country, according to Tim Peters, an American pastor who co-founded an NGO called Helping Hands that helps defectors flee.

An electric fence was added, as well as cameras at the border.

"On the Chinese side, patrols were also increased because Beijing is afraid an influx of refugees could destabilise its own regime," he added.

North Korea is visible from Yanji in China.

Once on Chinese soil, defectors must reach the city of Tumen that sits right up against the icy river, in a lunar landscape of barren hills.

North Korea is visible from the town - farmers in a village there can be seen plowing their fields with antique machinery.

Lee was tricked into the trade after she trusted a broker to plan her escape from North Korea, only to sell her off into sex work. (AP/AAP)

Lee crossed the Tumen River in a group of eight girls.

When she arrived in China, Lee said she was taken to a apartment on the fourth floor of a pale yellow building in Yanji, a city in Jilin province about 50 kilometers from Tumen, where most signs are written in Korean and Chinese and scores of restaurants sell bibimbap and kimchi, due to the large population of ethnic Koreans.

At the apartment, she realised there was no restaurant job.

Instead, Lee said her broker had sold her for 30,000 yuan (about AUD$6200) to the operator of a cybersex chatroom.

"When I found out, I felt so humiliated," she whispered.

"I started crying and asked to leave, but the boss said he had paid a lot of money for me and I now had a debt towards him."

Korean NGOs estimate that 70 to 80 per cent of North Korean women who make it to China are trafficked, for between 6000 and 30,000 yuan, depending on their age and beauty.

Some are sold as brides to Chinese farmers; more recently, girls have increasingly been trafficked into the cybersex industry, according to the KFI.

Rising wages in northern China cities have led to a greater demand for prostitutes among the male population, according to the KFI report.

In southern China, trafficked women from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia has typically met that demand. But in northeastern provinces, men have turned to North Korean refugees.

A spokesperson for the Chinese government said in a statement to CNN: "I want to stress that the Chinese government pays high attention to foreign citizens' legitimate rights according to law, also combat activities of human trafficking women and child."

Michael Glendinning, director of the KFI, said the Chinese government was "not doing enough to protect North Korean women and girls in its territory at all."

"China must work to crack down on the networks and individuals -- including Chinese public officials -- responsible for the trafficking of North Korean women and girls, he said.

Chun, after making contact with Lee, organised for a daring escape from the Chinese apartment she had been locked in for years. (CNN)

"But it must do so in a way that ensures that these women and girls are not repatriated to North Korea where they would face torture, imprisonment, and possibly extrajudicial killing."

Two other North Korean women already lived in the two-bedroom apartment Lee was delivered to. One was 27 years old, had her own bedroom and seemed close to the chatroom boss.

"I think she was supposed to spy on us," said Lee.

The other girl was Kwang Ha-Yoon, whose name has been changed to protect her identity for her safety. Kwang was 19 years old and had been locked up for two years when Lee arrived.

Kwang left North Korea to earn money to send to her family. "Both my mother and my grandmother had cancer and needed treatment," she said.

But all the money Kwang earned in China went to her captor.

Lee and Kwang had to share a room.

"The only furniture was two beds, two tables and two computers," recalled Kwang.

"Every morning, I would get up around 11am, have breakfast and then start working until dawn the next day."

Sometimes, she would only get four hours of sleep. If they complained, they would get beaten, although both women said they did not suffer sexual abuse by their captor.

Work involved logging onto an online chat platform on which South Korean men can pay to watch girls perform sexual acts.

The escape involved Lee abseiling out of a window and down the side of a building. (CNN)

Within minutes of logging on to the site, users are barraged by women on the platform sending text messages asking for a video chat in a private room. They all claim to be from a major city in South Korea.

The minimum price to chat on the site is 150 won (12 cents), but girls can set the entry price for a room, with popular accounts tending to have a more expensive entry fee.

Tips start at a minimum of 300 won, but can go far higher as customers try to persuade the girls to fulfill their requests.

Lee and Kwang were tasked by their captors with keeping the men online for as long as possible. In South Korea, where prostitution is illegal, these services have become increasingly popular in recent years.

"Some of the men just wanted to talk, but most wanted more," said Lee, with a shudder of disgust.

"They would ask me to take suggestive poses or to undress and touch myself. I had to do everything they asked."

"I felt like dying 1000 times, but I couldn't even kill myself as the boss was always watching us."

Her captor was a man of South Korean descent who slept in the living room to keep a close eye on the women.

"The front door was always locked from the outside and there was no handle on the inside," said Kwang.

"Every six months, he would take us out to the park."

On this small patch of green next to their apartment, retirees would meet to dance to music each afternoon.

"During those outings, he would always stay right next to us, so we never got to talk to anyone," said Lee.

In 2015, Lee tried to escape by climbing out of a window and down a metal drain, but she fell and hurt her back and leg. She still limps slightly.

When their captor wanted something from the girls, he would try to sweet talk them, promising a cut of their earnings or to let them go free to work in South Korea one day.

But when Kwang asked for a piece of the 60 million won (around AUD$73,000) she estimated she had made for him, he got angry.

"He started kicking, slapping and cursing me," she said.

During the seven years Kwang spent locked up in his apartment, she said he never gave her a cent.

A ray of light

It was during the summer of 2018 that Lee finally saw her chance to escape.

"One of my customers realised I was North Korean and was being held captive," said Lee.

While most men probably knew the girls weren't South Korean, because North Koreans have different accents and dialects to people in the south, they chose to look the other way.

This man was different.

"He bought a laptop and let me take control of the screen remotely, so I could send messages without my boss noticing," Lee said.

The man also gave her the phone number of a South Korean pastor named Chun Ki-Won.

Chun, a mild-mannered man with high cheekbones and wavy gray hair, is one of a band of Korean pastors who specialise in helping North Korean women escape from China.

Chun said his Christian aid organisation, Durihana, has helped over 1000 defectors reach Seoul since 1999.

Korean media has nicknamed him the Asian Schindler, after the German industrialist and Nazi Party member who saved the lives of 1200 Jews.

"In the past few years, dozens of missionaries linked to my organisation have been deported from China," he said from his Seoul office.

"There are only a few left, and they have to stay on the move constantly to avoid being arrested."

China is a close ally of Pyongyang and doesn't consider North Korean defectors refugees, instead seeing them as illegal economic migrants.

"When it catches them, it sends them back (to North Korea), where they face torture, internment in a labor camp and sometimes death," said Lee Eunkoo, the co-founder of Teach North Korean Refugees, an NGO that helps defectors learn English.

In September 2018, Lee contacted Pastor Chun on KakaoTalk, a Korean messaging service.

Over the following weeks, Lee explained to Chun how she had ended up in a cybersex chatroom. He asked her about the apartment's layout and her boss' comings and goings.

By mid-October a plan had been hatched: Chun would send a team to Yanji to extract Lee and Kwang.

On October 26, while Yumi's boss was away for the day, Durihana's members arrived at the foot of the building. The two girls knotted their bedsheets together and dropped them out of their window.

The extraction team then tied a rope to the sheets, which the girls pulled up and used to lower themselves safely to the ground.

They were only able to take a small backpack with a couple of essentials - a pack of wet wipes and a comb. They jumped into a car and sped away.

The whole operation took minutes.

Journey to the south

After escaping Yanji, Lee and Kwang said they went across China on buses and trains using fake Korean passports.

Their last stop was Kunming, in China's deep southwest.

From there, most defectors cross the border illegally into Laos or Myanmar and either head for the South Korean Embassy in the capital cities of those countries, or continue to Bangkok, in Thailand.

Lee and Kwang met with a Chinese man who took them across the mountains into a neighboring country.

"We walked for five hours through the jungle, before reaching a road where a car was waiting for us," said Kwang.

Chun later met them in the middle of the night on the side of a road.

"I burst into tears as soon as I saw him," said Kwang, who is now 24 years old. "For the first time in a very long time, I felt safe."

After two more days of traveling by car and bus, they reached the capital city. "We were stopped several times by the police for routine checks, I was terrified," said Kwang.

In total, they said their journey from Kunming took 50 hours.

At 5.30pm, the two defectors and Chun walked up to the black and golden gate of Seoul's diplomatic representation.

Before they had a chance to ring the bell, they said a man in a black shirt opened the door and ushered them inside with a smile.

A few minutes later, Chun walked out -- alone.

The embassy, which receives about 10 defectors a month, according to officials, kept the women for about 10 days for questioning. Those who satisfy the questioning process will fly to freedom in South Korea.

Upon arrival in South Korea, defectors spend three months at Hanawon, a processing center where they learn how to navigate staples of modern life such as taking the subway, getting cash from an ATM or buying groceries in a supermarket.

They are then provided with a South Korean passport, a subsidized apartment and the right to enroll at a university for free.

Before entering the South Korean Embassy, Lee had given her new life a lot of thought.

"I want to study English and Chinese and maybe become a teacher," she said.

Kwang, who had left school at 12, hoped to graduate.

"I never really had the luxury of wondering what to do with my life," she said.

© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019

4 years 41 weeks ago in  Health & Safety - China

 
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It has probably been happening for years, sadly.

 

It's not just situations like this either, there was a big outcry some years ago about people - a lot of them are kids - being abducted and sold as slaves to work in brick kilns. Then there are the kids who are deliberately crippled and forced into begging and I'm sure there are plenty of sweatshops out there doing the same thing.

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4 years 41 weeks ago
 
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Bumped

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4 years 41 weeks ago
 
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It has probably been happening for years, sadly.

 

It's not just situations like this either, there was a big outcry some years ago about people - a lot of them are kids - being abducted and sold as slaves to work in brick kilns. Then there are the kids who are deliberately crippled and forced into begging and I'm sure there are plenty of sweatshops out there doing the same thing.

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4 years 41 weeks ago
 
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Nice article. Thanks for sharing.

 

Went to a North Korean restaurant in Hefei several years ago. The girls working there did traditional dances for us while we drank some kind of North Korean moonshine. Girls were really nice, even when they found out we were Americans. My colleague happened to be Korean-American and could speak the language well. They told him they were confined to the building that housed the restaurant at all times. They also had to entertain Chinese businessmen in the in-house KTV. My colleague got the impression they had to do even more than that. I felt really bad for them and meant to go back at a later point to see how they were doing, but never ended up going. Just hope things turned out ok for them.

philbravery:

If i could have my time again and new what i know now..i think it would be trying to help people like them. Slavery is still rampent even in western counties

4 years 41 weeks ago
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Stiggs:

The problem would have been how to help those girls. The local officials there are probably involved somehow, if they got exposed China would send the girls back to NK where they and their family would be put in a camp and probably tortured.

 

The world is a fucked up place.A few times I've wondered if it would be possible to get a job helping child slaves get freed or something, or voluntary work but I can't see how it would be possible.

 

4 years 41 weeks ago
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philbravery:

I would hate to imagine how many people are kept as slaves in Australia and NewZealand. It would be a big number

4 years 41 weeks ago
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4 years 41 weeks ago
 
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https://news.yahoo.com/britains-may-urges-world-leaders-163602301.html

 

LONDON, June 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Britain's

 

prime minister will on Tuesday urge global leaders to do

 

more to tackle modern slavery, saying they have a "moral

 

duty" to combat a crime estimated to affect more than 40

 

million people worldwide.

 

more ...

 

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4 years 41 weeks ago
 
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Shifu

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Sure is; just look at how the local teachers work.sadindecision

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4 years 41 weeks ago
 
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Minor Official

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It is still happening, even in well-developed countries like America, and the worst thing is that it involves children
Also, I have found a resource with different points of view on this topic
https://studyhippo.com/essay-examples/human-trafficking/

 

Stiggs:

I read somewhere that the trade has increased a lot recently.

 

There are suddenly thousands of covid orphans - kids orphaned after their parents died of covid - in hard hit places like Brazil and India. That's when the opportunist predators appear.

 

I always thought it must be horrifying for the parents. Suffocating in their own fluids would be bad enough but knowing that if / when you die your kids will be alone in a brutal world...  I can't even imagine how hard that must be.

 

 

2 years 20 weeks ago
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sorrel:

@ Stiggs

human trafficking, along with the pharmaceutical industry, is one of the top 5 most profitable 'businesses' in the world.

Child/sex/human trafficking is mainly a 'customer led' business, if there was no demand, there would be no trafficking, but people everywhere use the 'excuse' "sure what harm am I doing" and refuse to believe that the seemingly harmless act of thinking that the trafficked women/children (especially) are there knowingly and by their willingness to 'consent' in what is happening to them. more often than not they are duped into travelling and then coerced/threatened into staying, as there are 'customers' who avail of their 'services' And guess which sex are the most willing 'customers' (users) of such women/children? Likewise those who want to move illegally to other countries, and can be subject to abuse/rape/torture/murder when they pay their traffickers?

2 years 20 weeks ago
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Stiggs:

Yes, it's a sick business. War, poverty, civil unrest etc probably contribute to it a lot.

2 years 20 weeks ago
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sorrel:

@ Stiggs,
pure greed and a lack of empathy are major contributors to this 'industry'
most traffickers could probably not hold down what would be tearmed a 'proper job' (of any sort)

2 years 20 weeks ago
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