Brutal S. Korea sex trade built for American soldiers

Victims seek to raise issue in United States

DONGDUCHEON, South Korea — When Cho Soon-ok was 17 in 1977, three men kidnapped and sold her to a pimp in Dongducheon, a town north of Seoul.

She was about to begin high school, but instead of pursuing her dream of becoming a ballerina, she was forced to spend the next five years under the constant watch of her pimp, going to a nearby club for sex work. Her customers: American soldiers.

The euphemism “comfort women” typically describes Korean and other Asian women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during World War II. But the sexual exploitation of another group of women continued in South Korea long after Japan’s colonial rule ended in 1945 — and it was facilitated by their own government.

There were “special comfort women units” for South Korean soldiers, and “comfort stations” for US-led United Nations troops during the Korean War. In the postwar years, many of these women worked in gijichon, or “camp towns,” built around US military bases.

In September, 100 such women won a landmark victory when the South Korean Supreme Court ordered compensation for the sexual trauma they endured. It found the government guilty of “justifying and encouraging” prostitution in camp towns to help South Korea maintain its military alliance with the United States and earn US dollars.

It also blamed the government for the “systematic and violent” way it detained the women and forced them to receive treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

In interviews, six former South Korean camp town women described how their government used them for political and economic gain before abandoning them. Encouraged by the court rulings — which relied on recently unsealed official documents — the victims aim to take their case to the United States.

“The Americans need to know what some of their soldiers did to us,” said Park Geunae, who was sold to a pimp in 1975, when she was 16, and said she endured severe beatings and other abuse from soldiers. “Our country held hands with the US in an alliance and we knew that its soldiers were here to help us, but that didn’t mean that they could do whatever they wanted to us, did it?”

In the aftermath of the Korean War, South Korea trailed the North in military and economic power. US troops stayed in the South under the UN flag to guard against the North, but South Korea struggled to keep US boots on the ground.

In 1961, Gyeonggi province, the populous area surrounding Seoul, considered it “urgent to prepare mass facilities for comfort women to provide comfort for U.N. troops or boost their morale,” according to documents submitted to the court as evidence. The local government gave permits to private clubs to recruit such women to “save budget and earn foreign currency.” It estimated the number of comfort women in its jurisdiction at 10,000 and growing, catering to 50,000 US troops.

When President Nixon announced plans in 1969 to reduce the number of US troops stationed in South Korea, the government’s effort took on more urgency. The following year, the government reported to parliament that South Korea was earning $160 million annually through business resulting from the US military presence, including the sex trade. (The country’s total exports at the time were $835 million.)

Some of the women gravitated to camp towns to find a living. Others, like Cho, were abducted, or lured with the promise of work. A sex act typically cost between $5 and $10 — money the pimps confiscated. Although the dollars didn’t go directly to the government, they entered the economy, which was starved for hard currency.

A South Korean newspaper at the time called such women an “illegal, cancer-like, necessary evil.” But “these comfort women are also front-line warriors in winning dollars,” it said.

Often, newcomers were drugged by their pimps to cope with the shame.

Prostitution was and remains illegal in South Korea, but enforcement has been selective and varied in harshness over time.