Editor’s note: This article contains details of sexual violence against women.

Every week, 53-year-old Lee Soon-sil visits an eastern medicine clinic to treat her aching knees. Already, more than a decade has passed since she first defected from North Korea, and yet she still suffers from injuries caused by the abuse and imprisonment she faced in the DPRK and China.

“I came to South Korea when I was 41, and I’ve miscarried three times. Treatments and medicines don’t work,” she said. “I was able to find freedom in the South, but only after I was trafficked three times in China.”

As Lee drove to the hospital, she recalled men cornering her in a dark alleyway in China — her first stop on a defection route that eventually took her to South Korea. 

The men demanded that she lift her shirt and then groped at her body, sizing her up “as if they were haggling to purchase a dog in the countryside,” she said. Lee was afraid and did whatever the men ordered her to do — she didn’t want them to report her to Chinese police, who would then repatriate her back North. A broker had sold her to them, and did so at least two more times before she managed to escape.

More than a decade later, Lee says she’s happily married and settled into her South Korean life. But the sexual assaults she was forced to quietly endure still haunt her — she still suffers from lingering reproductive health issues today.

At least 60% of women North Korean defectors in China are sex trafficked, according to recent estimates from the Korea Future Initiative. And once they’re in South Korea, they could still face serious sexual harassment or assault — in general, 1 in 5 South Korean women are believed to be victims of these crimes. 

Meanwhile, around 1 in 4 of women defectors experienced sexual violence after resettling in the South, according to a 2017 survey.

Now, the issue is even more front and center: Several women North Korean defectors say they’ve been raped and sexually assaulted by South Korea intelligence and police officers who were tasked with protecting them. But as is the case with many sexual assaults, these defectors are met with overwhelming doubt and blame.

“They came to South Korea risking their precious lives,” Jeon Su-mi, a lawyer who’s helping a defector sue a police officer for sexual violence, said in a press release. “These perpetrators keep misusing their public authority and sexually assaulting women defectors. It is a crime against humanity.” 

ASSAULT IN THE NATIONAL SPOTLIGHT

In July 2020, a South Korean police officer was charged with allegedly raping and sexually assaulting a woman North Korean defector he was assigned to individually protect. The senior officer, who worked at Seocho Station, is accused of assaulting defector at least 10 times over the course of a year and a half. The police officer reportedly countersued the woman for “false accusation” and defamation. 

Then, earlier this month, two high-level South Korean military intelligence officers were indicted on charges of raping a different North Korean defector several times between 2018 and 2019. 

The two cases might speak to a larger phenomenon of women defectors facing recurrent abuse. In general, many women defectors are offered “personal protection officers” for a mandatory of five years upon their arrival to the South, and unequal power dynamics or abuse could factor into the assaults.

But Lee — a victim of sexual violence herself — isn’t convinced the charges are true.

“I just don’t buy it,” she told NK News. “Do you have any idea how caring and devoted these officers are to us defectors? It’s probably those women’s fault — those who don’t try diligently enough to resettle here after defecting, those who give up their bodies here and there so easily.”

Yet some prominent politicians are indeed buying it. Ten lawmakers, including recently elected defector-politicians Ji Seong-ho and Thae Yong-ho — proposed a bill last month that would allow women defectors to choose the gender of their personal protection officers.

Around 72% of North Korean defectors in South Korea are women, and the current protection system is prone to “infringe on women’s rights,” the bill proposal stated.

In Lee’s case, the scenario is hard to imagine: Her personal protection officer bought her expensive beef barbecue, gifts and treats her like a friend.

“I was sick and tired of North Korean policemen back in the North, but here, we are proud of our officers,” she said. 

Jeong Jin-hwa, a 55-year-old defector, left North Korea in 1999 and came to the South in 2002. She remembers the pain of being “bought and sold like goods” in China, where she was “not treated like a human being.”

But even Jeong said she felt uncomfortable with how South Korean headlines framed accused officers as “criminals.”

“People in North Korea do not have a good understanding of sexual crime because there’s no sense of what human rights is in the first place,” she said. On the other hand, South Korean society “talks about human rights day in and day out.”

“[The victim] was an adult,” Jeong said, referring to the woman defector who alleges that a police officer repeatedly raped her. “Unlike back in North Korea, she would have known that she could say no here. She could have just chosen not to open the door for him.”

GENERATIONAL DIVIDES

South Korea’s younger generation of North Korean defectors see things a bit differently.

Twenty-seven-year-old Park Sung-ae, who defected from North Korea in 2008, said she sympathized with the women victims “not just because I am a defector, but because I’m a woman, like them.”

Born in North Hamgyong Province in 1993, Park is a bonafide millennial — she’s a YouTuber, a radio host and an NGO worker. She also recently leveraged her YouTube fame to talk about the recent sexual assault cases involving women defectors, who she says “cannot fiercely resist because of power differences.”

Just like other South Korean women in their 20s, Park was enraged by the 2016 “Gangnam Station Exit 10” murder, a flashpoint for South Korea’s movement against gender-based violence. She’s also supportive of the country’s recent #MeToo movement.

“I promised myself that I will speak up and respond strongly should something like this ever happen to me,” she said.

But the subject of sexual violence is almost completely engulfed by taboo in the DPRK, where “abuses are common” and “where women are silenced and blamed.” Park remembers her teenage years in the DPRK and recalls how one classmate was forced to get an abortion. She remembers the incident seriously impacting the classmate’s reputation, with others judging her as “easy” or “flirtatious.”

Defector-lawmaker Ji Seong-ho has similar memories from his time in the North.

“Where I was from, there were many cases [of sexual assaults],” Ji said. “But they were all hush-hush, and women victims were shamed. This culture that silences victims still exists in the North.” 

“That’s why many [defectors] who are abused here stay silent. They think speaking up will ruin their reputation,” Park lamented. “The defectors fled from the North and came to this law-abiding community, but they still live in the shadows of their hometown.” 

UNIVERSAL HURT

The vast majority of North Korean defectors in South Korea are women. In 2019, women accounted for more than 80% of new escapees — and that number is only slightly above the past decade’s average male-to-female ratio. Meanwhile, nearly 60% of incoming women defectors were in their 20s and 30s until 2019. 

In general, older women defectors tend to see women’s rights as maternal rights, according to Kwon Keumsang, author of “Heroic North Korean Woman’s Sexuality and the Nation.” But the difference in understanding is “just the same as South Korea’s generation gap in general,” she said.

Amid South Korea’s own ongoing #MeToo movement, “it’s harder for [older defectors] to understand and sympathize.” Meanwhile, younger defectors “are infuriated and realize they were not protected.”

“Many people generalize the defector population as one homogenous group,” Park said. “But we are all different in our views. Me and my friends who left North Korea as teenagers sympathize and stand with the victims.”

“But I understand,” Park said. “For those who left North Korea when they were older, it would be hard for them to escape from the way of thinking that they had to internalize back in the North.” 

But no matter how old they are, the hard truth is that most women defectors have suffered incredible pain. Speaking on her own YouTube channel, Lee Soon-sil tears up as she talks about her three-year-old daughter, who was kidnapped by traffickers at the DPRK-China border and sold for 3,000 yuan ($432).

“I don’t even know if she is still alive,” Lee said. “And before the traffickers took her away, she said to me: ‘I won’t say I’m hungry anymore, mom. Please take me with you.’”

Edited by Kelly Kasulis