Global Issues

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North Korea

• Source country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor, forced marriage, and sex trafficking.

• North Korean women and girls commonly migrate to China, often with the help of a facilitator, seeking food, work, freedom, and better life prospects, then are forced into marriage, prostitution, or labor.

• Trafficking networks of Korean-Chinese and North Koreans operate along the China-North Korean border, reportedly working with Chinese and North Korean border guards to recruit women for marriage or prostitution in China.

• North Korean women often pass through many hands, with multiple brokers involved in their trafficking.

• Vulnerable North Korean women who make their own way to China are lured, drugged, or kidnapped by traffickers upon arrival. Others are offered jobs, but are subsequently trafficked into involuntary servitude, through forced marriages to Chinese men, often of Korean ethnicity, into forced prostitution in brothels, or the Internet sex industry.

 

Advocacy:

• Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers is a coalition of sex worker groups and projects working on issues of HIV and human rights for female, male and transgender sex workers across Asia and the Pacific.

 

Sources: U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report 2011