North Korean defector alleges rape by South Korean intelligence officers

While she may have escaped the horrors of North Korea, one woman who defected to South Korea says she has been forced into a new nightmare. For the past year, two South Korean defense intelligence command officers have been repeatedly raping her, she alleges. The woman says the men also forced her to have two abortions.

The Korea Herald confirmed today that the defense ministry’s criminal investigation command requested an indictment by military prosecution at the end of November. The two officers are currently suspended while an investigation commences. The two—a lieutenant colonel and a master sergeant—were in custody of the woman as part of their duty to protect defectors. Allegedly the master sergeant raped the woman dozens of times; the lieutenant colonel once.

South Korean defense ministry spokeswoman Choi Hyun-soo said the officials “would be appropriately handled depending on the investigation results,” BBC reported. 

North Korean women are particularly vulnerable to rape and sexual abuse when they defect, activists say.

“They’re not used to speaking out, being educated about sexual violence, and demanding their rights,” an activist from Human rights group Korea Future Initiative told BBC. “They don't know that when they are sexually assaulted it’s a crime and that people can be held accountable or be compensated.”

North Korean defectors—72 percent of whom are women or girls, according to the South Korean ministry of reunification—are also at risk for being trafficked into the sex trade in China. Many women and girls “are forced into at least one form of sexual slavery within a year of leaving their homeland,” according to BBC. A 2018 assessment by Amnesty International found that some North Korean women “were able to leave the country through deals with human traffickers, only to find themselves subjected to physical and sexual abuse or exploitative work conditions once on the Chinese side of the border.”

Also, many women and girls may have already been sexually violated before leaving North Korea. With hundreds of thousands of citizens being reportedly being held in detention centers and government-run concentration camps, abuse and humiliation of all kinds is common. Defectors and former guards have said that women are frequently raped by camp guards, forcibly given abortions, and killed or disappeared after rape and/or pregnancy.

“Captives of all genders and ages are given insufficient food and resources to live. Many brought or born into the gulags are at risk of dying from starvation, if not execution,” WMC Women Under Siege reported. “Girls and women, however, are given access to extra rations during their tenure as a guard’s rape target.” Journalist Blaine Harden told Siege: “It’s an awful game that they are forced to play.” He went on to describe how girls are given more food if they “comply” with rape. When they become pregnant or fall out of favor, the woman or girl may be killed, he said.

For more on the treatment of women and girls in North Korea, see WMC Women Under Siege’s conflict profile here.