In the ‘Red Zone’ border between China and North Korea, children as young as 12 are often targeted for sexual violence and sexually exploited by organised crime gangs.
Since the 1994–1998 famine, which killed between 240,000 and 3.5mn people, this has been a well-established fear, as reported by Global Rights Compliance, an international human rights law firm that has investigated rights violations in the region since 2020. Victims have fled “the Hermit kingdom” into neighbouring China.
A new “black hole” of human rights abuses has emerged in China as a result of the country’s response to the pandemic, with criminal gangs profiting in silence from a $105mn (£86mn) human trafficking industry while the rest of the world turns a blind eye, according to the Global Rights Compliance.
The group claims that “the practise is becoming increasingly normalised,” with women being beaten and sold for as little as a few hundred dollars at villages and towns across the country.
“I was sold to a Han Chinese living in Yanbian,’ one North Korean defector told investigators from the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKBD). “We lived together for one year and we couldn’t have a child, so he beat me. He kicked me. He kicked my head a lot. I have depression now as the aftermath.”
Refugees have been trying to cross the northern border into China to escape North Korea’s repressive dictatorship for years.
In certain cases, government officials are said to ‘aid and abet’ sex and bride trafficking, and in others, people are allegedly bribed to keep quiet about suspected defectors.
North Koreans who seek asylum in China, a so-called ally, are sent back to their country, where they are labelled “traitors,” subjected to forced labour, imprisonment without trial, and even the death penalty.
Victims leaving the North Korean government are more vulnerable to criminal organisations that want to exploit their plight since they cannot turn to the authorities for aid.
Global Rights Compliance’s North Korea Senior Legal Advisor, Sofia Evangelou, told MailOnline, “For North Korean people to escape North Korea… the only way to do that is by receiving support from brokers.”
“Many of them… deceive people, or take advantage of the fact that they [are] so desperate to escape North Korea, and [sell] them into trafficking rings, or to [criminal] organisations conducting forced labour, and so on.”
It is estimated that roughly 70% of North Korean migrants will be women. Gangs make the most money off of selling these women into the sex trade.
70 to 80 per cent of the North Korean women who have fled to China are victims of human trafficking.
Ms Evangelou said, “It’s something that has been going on for a more than a decade, since people started to leave North Korea – from the beginning of the 2000s, following the famine that occurred in 1995.”
“There was a great influx of people leaving because they were starving… however, the situation has deteriorated because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Women who were previously working in forced labour or being exploited in other ways, in other industries, have now been transferred into – for example – the cybersex industry.”
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