The United Nations estimates between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners are detained in four large political prison camps in North Korea.
A UN report detailed cases of “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation”.
Women remain particularly vulnerable in a country where the police, market inspectors and soldiers are predominantly male and are routinely subjected to sexual violence by government officials, prison guards, interrogators, police, prosecutors, and soldiers, according to a new report, with groping and unwanted advances a part of daily life for women working in the country’s burgeoning black markets.
Men in power operate with impunity and “when a guard or police officer ‘picks’ a woman, she has no choice but to comply with any demands he makes, whether for sex, money, or other favours” according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.
A UN report detailed cases of “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation”.
Women remain particularly vulnerable in a country where the police, market inspectors and soldiers are predominantly male and are routinely subjected to sexual violence by government officials, prison guards, interrogators, police, prosecutors, and soldiers, according to a new report, with groping and unwanted advances a part of daily life for women working in the country’s burgeoning black markets.
Men in power operate with impunity and “when a guard or police officer ‘picks’ a woman, she has no choice but to comply with any demands he makes, whether for sex, money, or other favours” according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.
“It happens so often nobody thinks it is a big deal,” said one woman. “We don’t even realise when we are upset. But we are human, and we feel it. So sometimes, out of nowhere, you cry at night and don’t know why.”
Many women expressed a sense that the abuse they endured was so normalised almost no one thought to file a complaint against the perpetrators.
North Korea attempts to portray itself as a socialist paradise free of crime, and in a submission to the UN last year said only five people were convicted of rape in 2015 and seven in 2011. But the Human Right Watch report paints a different picture.
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