According to a stunning and bone-chillingly horrific new report in The Independent of the U.K., which cites an investigation from a small NGO called the Korea Future Initiative, there is a transnational criminal network in which “tens of thousands” of hapless North Korean women are “sold into China sex trade and systemically raped.”
Per The Independent:
Tens of thousands of North Korean women and girls are trafficked and sold into the sex trade in China where they are forced to endure systemic rape, sexual slavery and cybersex trafficking, according to a new report.
The investigation, by the Korea Future Initiative, has uncovered new and disturbing patterns of horrific sexual abuse perpetrated against trafficked North Korean women and girls in mainland China. It found women are also being subject to sex trafficking, sexual abuse, prostitution and forced marriage there.
“Pushed from their homeland by a patriarchal regime that survives through the imposition of tyranny, poverty, and oppression, North Korean women and girls are passed through the hands of traffickers, brokers, and criminal organisations,” the report says. “Before being pulled into China’s sex trade, where they are exploited and used by men until their bodies are depleted.”
According to the report, the “‘complex and interconnected network of criminality’ accrues an estimated $105 million annually” from the grisly treatment of North Korean women as mere commodities for the transnational criminal networks.
The full report can be viewed here.
The report’s author, Yoon Hee-soon, explained: “The exploitation of North Korean women and girls generates annual profits of at least $105 million for the Chinese underworld. Victims are prostituted for as little as ¥30 Chinese Yuan ($4), sold as wives for just ¥1000 Chinese Yuan ($146), and trafficked into cybersex dens for exploitation by a global online audience.”
The report’s authors describe the nature of the complex operation as a “damning indictment” of the governments of both North Korea and China:
At a time when significant global capital is invested in China and, more recently, political capital expended on North Korea, it is a damning indictment that North Korean women and girls are left languishing in the sex trade. Condemnation is insufficient. Only tangible acts can dismantle China’s sex trade, confront a North Korean regime that abhors women, and rescue sex slaves scattered across brothels, remote townships, and cybersex dens in mainland China. That Korea Future Initiative — a small nongovernmental organisation that receives no funding or support from governments, human rights institutions, or grant-giving bodies — was able to uncover abuses largely overlooked by the international community should act as an incentive to all.
The hermit kingdom of North Korea is the world’s last truly Stalinist, gulag state. In 2017, NBC News described a report by the International Bar Association War Crimes Committee. As NBC News chillingly reported, “Thomas Buergenthal — a renowned judge on the committee and a survivor of Auschwitz — told The Washington Post that North Korea’s gulags ‘are as terrible, or even worse’ than the Nazi camps he experienced as a child.”
Denuclearization talks between the U.S. and North Korea are presently at a standstill. As The Daily Wire reported last month, North Korea recently demanded that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not be a part of any future negotiations.