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After Fleeing North Korea, Women Get Trapped as Cybersex Slaves in ChinaImageKim Ye-na, 23, left, and Lee Jin-hui, 20, two North Korean women who were forced to perform cybersex in China, looking out from their hotel room in Vientiane, Laos.CreditCreditAdam Dean for The New York Times
By Choe Sang-Hun
Sept. 13, 2019
VIENTIANE, Laos — For more than two years, Lee Jin-hui, 20, was never allowed to leave a three-room apartment in northeast China. Seven days a week, she had to sit at a computer from noon to 5 a.m., performing sex acts before a webcam for male clients, mostly from South Korea.
In the apartment, Ms. Lee and other North Korean women each had to earn about $820 a week for the Chinese pimp who bought them from human traffickers. When they failed, they were slapped, kicked and denied food.
“We had to work even when we were sick,” Ms. Lee said. “I wanted to get out so badly, but all I could do was peek out the window.”
Each year, human smugglers take thousands of women seeking to flee North Korea, promising them jobs in China, according to human rights groups and trafficking survivors. But once in China, many of the women are sold to unmarried men in rural towns or to pimps for exploitation in brothels and cybersex dens.
If they are caught running away from traffickers, China sends them back to North Korea, where they face torture and incarceration in labor camps. With nowhere to turn for help in China, they remain trapped in sex slavery.
An estimated 60 percent of female North Korean refugees in China are trafficked into the sex trade, and increasingly coerced into cybersex, the London-based rights group Korea Future Initiative said in a report in May.
“Girls aged as young as 9 are forced to perform graphic sex acts and are sexually assaulted in front of webcams, which are live-streamed to a paying global audience, many of whom are believed to be South Korean men,” the report said.
When she was smuggled out of North Korea in spring 2017, Ms. Lee was told she would be waitressing in China. When she arrived, her boss said her job was “chatting” at the computer. Until then, she had never seen a computer. She didn’t know what a webcam was. She was 18.
“I thought ‘chatting’ was some kind of bookkeeping with a computer,” said Kim Ye-na, 23, who was smuggled out last November, believing she would pick mushrooms in China. “I never imagined what it would turn out to be.”
Both Ms. Lee and Ms. Kim fled their captivity on Aug. 15.
Six days later, they arrived in Vientiane, Laos, with a man who was paid $4,000 to smuggle them across the China-Laos border. Waiting for them was the Rev. Chun Ki-won, a Christian pastor from South Korea who funded and orchestrated their rescue.
The women agreed to interviews while in Vientiane, using nicknames they were given on the run to protect their privacy and avoid the North Korean government’s possible retaliation against their relatives in the North. Though The New York Times could not independently corroborate some details of their flight, recordings of online conversations between Mr. Chun and the women made before their escape supported their accounts.
”Given China’s increasing crackdown on undocumented foreigners, locking North Korean women in apartments for cybersex has become a favorite way for human traffickers to exploit them,” said Mr. Chun. “They drug the women to dull their shame and make them work long hours.”
Out of North Korea
Ms. Lee and Ms. Kim were from North Korea’s “generation of the Arduous March”: children born around the 1990s, when famine wiped out 10 percent of the population. Barely out of elementary school, they started working. Ms. Kim toiled in a jade mine and later joined the unofficial market, selling fruits and South Korean clothes smuggled from China. Ms. Lee collected and sold wild herbs.
As they grew up, their hometown, Hyesan, and other towns along the narrow river border with China became hunting ground for human traffickers. In 2017, a relative sold Ms. Lee.
“I myself wanted to go to China because I heard of girls gone there sending money to their families,” said Ms. Lee.
After changing hands twice between human traffickers, Ms. Lee ended up with a man who held five North Korean women captive in Helong, in northeast China.
Ms. Kim, too, wanted a way out. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, had begun cracking down on young merchants in the markets, hoping to drive them toward state-led building projects. A female smuggler whom Ms. Kim had befriended agreed to take her to China.
At 4 a.m. on Nov. 18, the smuggler, her brother and Ms. Kim were waiting at the border when a soldier appeared out of the darkness. He told them the way was clear.
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