Here is a third story - a girl called Lola, who was 17 when she accepted a job
as a teacher. Her recruiter took her to a house where she was forced to have
sex with as many as 30 men per day. The first day at the house she was "broken"
in a "drive," in which six men raped her.
The difference between Lee, Park and Lola is that Lola was forced to become a
sex slave last year, working in Israel, according to Victor Malarek in his book
"The Natashas." Malarek also identified women who had been trafficked into
Korea.
Let no one underestimate the atrocity that was perpetrated by Japan during its
occupation of this country. Thousands of women were forced to serve as "comfort
women," a euphemism which is only rivaled by phrases like "collateral damage"
in its degree of repellent obfuscation. Sadly, Japanese Prime Minister Kenzo
Abe missed yet another opportunity to give a proper apology for Japan's conduct
during his recent trip to the United States.
Nonetheless, Korea might command more respect in its quest for apologies and
reparations to comfort women if it were more active in assisting their
modern-day equivalents.
Comfort women or, rather, sex slaves, live among us. There are hundreds of
women in Korea who live in sexual servitude, serving thousands of men, in
brothels and room salons. According to Dr June Lee of the International
Organization for Migration in Seoul, the leading inter-governmental
organization in this field, women from the Philippines and the former Soviet
Union are still being lured into Korea daily despite tougher laws against
prostitution, sex tourism and improvements in policing and prevention.
In other words, the human trafficking of sex slaves is not just an issue of
historical interest, involving the comfort women of a past era. Parents in
Korea, the Philippines, Russia and a host of other countries are shedding tears
for young girls who are currently being abused in Korea and elsewhere, in ways
that are distressingly similar to those endured by the comfort women of the
1940s.
In 2001 the US State Department in a report classified Korea as one of 23
countries that did not meet the minimum standards for the elimination of
trafficking. Korea has since been removed from the list but that decision is
currently under review.
And there is another aspect of this issue. Modern day comfort women are now
enslaved in cyberspace, as well as in dingy brothels. According to the National
Police Agency there is huge demand for Internet pornography in Korea. Those who
use these porn sites and pay for them with their credit cards are often putting
money into the pockets of those who enslave women and force them to perform
brutal sex acts in front of a video camera.
There have also been reports that Korean-Americans based in the US, often
associated with organized crime, have lured young Korean girls to Los Angeles
and New York where they are forced to become prostitutes in American brothels.
The global problem of "comfort women" is growing. According to the US State
Department, between 800,000 and 1 million women are forced into sexual
servitude every year. Korea may represent only a small part of this problem but
its hands are not clean.
If Korea wants a full apology for Japan's abuse of Korean women in the past it
could do much to gain international support for its cause if it took the lead
role in Asia in the fight against sexual slavery.
This is down to men. It is men who use sex slaves, it is overwhelmingly men and
the sexist attitudes that so many retain who objectify women through internet
pornography and support a whole new industry devoted to their servitude.
Maybe every male politician here who has sought to gain favor among the
nationalist constituency, by whipping up fervor against Japan over the comfort
women issue, could now take a pledge to work one hour per week to bring an end
to sexual slavery.
In his poem "Parting creates beauty," the Korean poet Han Young-un wrote "There
is no beauty of parting in the ephemeral gold of the morning; nor in the
seamless black silk of the night." For many Korean women forced into sexual
bondage, their parting from family and friends, had all the beauty of Dante's
Inferno
So long as sexual slavery persists, until we live in a world where no woman
need fear abduction in the "seamless black silk of the night," nobody can claim
that the issue of sexual slavery has been truly resolved.
Copyright 2007
Asia Sentinel, reprinted with permission.
