The US Trafficking in persons report (July 2001) included South Korea among 23 countries that, in the eyes of the US State Department, failed to meet minimum standards in attempting to stop trafficking in human beings. While the report mentioned the trafficking of South Korean women, it failed to notice that South Korea is itself a receiving country of trafficked women.This study represents IOM Seoul's continuing efforts to collect and publicize accurate information on trafficking in South Korea. The aim is to locate existing sources of information and identify those areas for which further research is needed.
The 2020 UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons is the fifth of its kind mandated by the General Assembly through the 2010 United Nations Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons. It covers more than 130 countries and provides an overview of patterns and flows of trafficking in persons at global, regional and national levels, based primarily on trafficking cases detected between 2017 and 2019. As UNODC has been systematically collecting data on trafficking in persons for more than a decade, trend information is presented for a broad range of indicators.
Based on in-depth ethnographic work, this book presents a study of Filipinas trafficked to South Korea, focusing on women who entered South Korea as migrant entertainers and subsequently became deployed in exploitative work environments around US military bases there. It contributes to the extension of our knowledge about human trafficking in the Asian region through an exploration of the experiences of more than 100 women who took part in the study. The book challenges many of the accepted understandings about "trafficking victims" and unravels the implications of these narrow understandings for the women themselves. It explores the ways women negotiate trafficking largely outside of the emerging formal anti-trafficking framework, and explains how new community formations and social networks emerge crafted by the women themselves to manage and overcome their vulnerabilities in migration.
This report, which comprises three booklets, provides a comprehensive analysis of the crime of trafficking in persons and how different countries are responding to this crisis. Countries worldwide have been detecting and reporting a larger number of victims and are also convicting more traffickers than ever before. This may well be the result of an increase in the capacity to identify victims over the last few years. While the number of reporting countries did not significantly increase, the number of victims reported in different countries did increase. The trend has unfortunately been growing over the past few years.
On the black market, they’re the third most profitable commodity, after illegal weapons and drugs. The only difference is that these goods are human, to their handlers they are wholly expendable. They are women and girls, some as young as twelve, from all over the Eastern Bloc, where sinister networks of organized crime have become entrenched in the aftermath of the collapse of the Communist regimes. In Israel, they’re called Natashas, whether they’re actually from Russia, Bosnia, the Czech Republic, or Ukraine. Lured into vans and onto airplanes with promises of jobs as waitresses, models, nannies, dishwashers, maids, and dancers, they are then stripped of their identification, and their brutal nightmare begins. They are sold into prostitution and kept enslaved; those who resist are beaten, raped, and sometimes killed. They often have nowhere to turn. In many cases, the men who should be rescuing them—immigration officials, police officers, or international peacekeepers—are among their most hostile aggressors. The worldwide traffic in human beings is already a crisis of epic proportions, and it continues to grow. Victor Malarek here exposes the global phenomenon of sexual trafficking, a form of twenty-first century slavery and a multibillion-dollar industry whose scope has, until now, remained largely unknown. The Natashas is an indispensable and startling call to action to seek out institutional corruption and to put a stop to this heinous crime against humanity.
Examining transnational crime, human trafficking and its implications for human security from both Western and Asian perspectives, this book assesses the extent of the problem, outlines how it is perceived differently in different countries, and the diverse social and legal policy reactions which have developed to address these issues.
Violence and Gender in the Globalized World expands the critical picture of gender and violence in the age of globalization by introducing a variety of uncommonly discussed geo-political sites and dynamics. The volume hosts methodologically and disciplinarily diverse contributions from around the world, discussing various contexts including Chechnya, Germany, Iraq, Kenya, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, Syria, South Africa, the United States, and the Internet. Bringing together scholars’ and activists’ historicized and site-specific perspectives, this book bridges the gap between theory and practice concerning violence, gender, and agency. In this revised and updated edition, the scope of inquiry is expanded to incorporate phenomena that have recently come to the forefront of public and scholarly scrutiny, such as Internet-based discourses of violence, female suicide bombers, and the Islamic State’s violence against women. At the same time, new data and developments are brought to bear on earlier discussions of violence against women across the globe in order to bring them fully up to date. With an international team of contributors, comprising eminent scholars, activists and policy-makers, this volume will be of interest to anyone conducting research in the areas of gender and sexuality, human rights, cultural studies, law, sociology, political science, history, post-colonialism and colonialism, anthropology, philosophy and religion.
Since the Korean War, gijichon—U.S. military camp towns—have been fixtures in South Korea. The most popular entertainment venues in gijichon are clubs, attracting military clientele with duty-free alcohol, music, shows, and women entertainers. In the 1990s, South Korea's rapid economic advancement, combined with the stigma and low pay attached to this work, led to a shortage of Korean women willing to serve American soldiers. Club owners brought in cheap labor, predominantly from the Philippines and ex-Soviet states, to fill the vacancies left by Korean women. The increasing presence of foreign workers has precipitated new conversations about modernity, nationalism, ethnicity, and human rights in South Korea. International NGOs, feminists, and media reports have identified women migrant entertainers as "victims of sex trafficking," insisting that their plight is one of forced prostitution. Are women who travel to work in such clubs victims of trafficking, sex slaves, or simply migrant women? How do these women understand their own experiences? Is antitrafficking activism helpful in protecting them? In On the Move for Love, Sealing Cheng attempts to answer these questions by following the lives of migrant Filipina entertainers working in various gijichon clubs. Focusing on their aspirations for love and a better future, Cheng's ethnography illuminates the complex relationships these women form with their employers, customer-boyfriends, and families. She offers an insightful critique of antitrafficking discourses, pointing to the inadequacy of recognizing women only as victims and ignoring their agency and aspirations. Cheng analyzes the women's experience in South Korea in relation to their subsequent journeys to other countries, providing a diachronic look at the way migrant issues of work, sex, and love fit within the larger context of transnationalism, identity, and global hierarchies of inequality.
