ed Defector prostitutes

It is both sad and alarming that some former North Korean women, who have defected to the South, end up working at entertainment spots as prostitutes to make a living.

What an irony! They came to Korea in the teeth of life-threatening adversity and pain of leaving the family for a better life than the gulag that was their previous home, escaping from the tyranny of the dynastic Kim family and an ever-dwindling ration. Here in what was supposed to be the land of new opportunity, they are living a life that they can’t say is much better than their old one.

This is a failure of the current “adaptation programs” for northern defectors, running the risk of relegating them to the permanent lot of poverty and hopelessness, and turning them into a new class of discontents in our society.

Reports have it that these women in their 20s and 30s work at “ticket” tea rooms where they have sex with customers for the duration of the ticket purchased while delivering outside orders, or serve at singing rooms as sex partners for paying customers.

There are a cluster of such places in Yongin and Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi Province, with some of them being run by owners who themselves are from the North. These women have professed that they have turned to prostitution because they couldn’t make a living, much less find a decent job. The government offers job training programs and helps the defectors find jobs but fresh from the programs, they as novices are paid little without the strongest social safety net ― families to back them up.

According to the Korea Hana Foundation, a quasi-government organization for defectors, about 18 percent of them make between 500,000 won and 1 million won per month, although slightly over 70 percent make between 1 million won and 2 million won. Another Hana survey of 2,444 defectors aged 15 or over tells the situation most vividly as about 61 percent think they belong to a lower class, while about 36 percent think they are middle class. As a matter of fact, one in five wanted to go back to their old home in the North. Currently, about 29,000 North Koreans have defected to the South with 70 percent of them or nearly 26,000 being women.

If they are left without stronger bootstrap programs, more of them could sink to the bottom of the social ladder. The defectors offer us a trial run for unification, and obviously by the plight these northern people face we are failing. Unless we start to prepare now, we will fail even more miserably when unification that requires the integration of 25 million North Koreans comes.