The following is an excerpt from a longer article, which will be published this fall in the Korean Quarterly.
South Korea clearly does not fit the profile of most major source countries for sex trafficking. For South Korea is the world’s 13th largest economy and a member of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Its real per capita income, according to the World Bank, is just under $27,000—about the same as Greece and Italy. In mid-2009 (at the height of the global recession), moreover, the country’s employment rate was only 3.9 percent, one of the lowest in the industrialized world at the time. Significantly, too, in terms of the United Nation’s Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), South Korea ranks fairly high: 26th in the world, which is comparable to Germany, Israel and Greece and one of the best in Asia (behind only Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore). Yet, as I just suggested, South Korea is a major source of trafficked and smuggled women in the global commercial sex trade. The major destinations, not surprisingly, include some of the wealthiest countries and regions—the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. But, other significant destination countries include those with a level of development very similar to South Korea, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, and countries that are much poorer: Vietnam, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.[i]
Minimally, there are tens of thousands of Korean women involved in global sex trafficking at any one time, and perhaps hundreds of thousands over the past several decades. In the United States specifically, there are likely at least five to ten thousand sexually exploited Korean women in total, and as many as 20,000 (perhaps more). Unfortunately, it is impossible to provide a precise estimate. It is also important to note that, rather than decreasing as the country has become richer, sex trafficking (including smuggling for sexual exploitation) from Korea, by all accounts, is steadily growing. There are several reasons for this, which I will talk about shortly. First, though, it is also worth emphasizing that South Korea is not only an important source of global sex trafficking, but is also a significant destination. Since the 1990s, in particular, thousands of women primarily from the Philippines, Russia, China, and Central Asia, have been “imported” into South Korea to work as prostitutes near US military bases for American soldiers (since the mid-2000s, though, the US military command has attempted to stamp out this practice through an anti-human trafficking campaign). At the same time, wealthy and middle class Korean men are increasingly fueling the demand for foreign sex workers in South Korea,[ii] for just as American men demand easily exploited, “exotic” foreign women, so do Korean men.
South Korea, however, is not unique. There are a number of countries that are both major sources of and destinations for global sex trafficking (it is also important to recall that all countries have their own, internally generated source of sex trafficking). Still, it is likely that South Korea stands alone as the most prosperous “supplier” of sexually exploited women to the rest of the world in general, and to the United States more specifically.
[i] Dong-Hoon Seol and Geon-Soo Han, “Korean Migrant Women in Entertainment Business in the United States, Japan, and Australia,” Report prepared for the Bombit Women’s Foundation (Seoul, South Korea, 2009).
[ii] Dong-Hoon Seol, “International Sex Trafficking in Women in Korea: Its Causes, Consequences and Countermeasures,” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 10, no. 2 (June 30, 2004).
