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Fleeing North Korea, Women Get Trapped as Cybersex Slaves in China

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Kim Ye-na, 23, left, and Lee Jin-hui, 20, two North Korean women who were forced
to perform cybersex in China, looking out from their hotel room in Vientiane,
Laos.Credit class="css-1dv1kvn">CreditAdam
Dean for The New York Times

itemprop="author">By class="css-1riqqik e1jsehar0">Choe Sang-Hun itemprop="name">

Sept. 13, 2019, 5:05 p.m. ET

VIENTIANE, Laos
- For more than two years, Lee Jin-hui, 20, was never allowed to leave a three-room
apartment in northeast China. Seven days a week, she had to sit at a computer
from noon to 5 a.m., performing sex acts before a webcam for male clients, mostly
from South Korea.

In the apartment,
Ms. Lee and other North Korean women each had to earn about $820 a week for
the Chinese pimp who bought them from human traffickers. When they failed, they
were slapped, kicked and denied food.

“We had to work
even when we were sick,” Ms. Lee said. color="blue">“I wanted to get out so badly, but all I could do was peek out
the window.”

Each year, human
smugglers take thousands of women seeking to flee North Korea, promising them
jobs in China, according to human rights groups and trafficking survivors. But
once in China, many of the women are sold to class="css-1g7m0tk" title>unmarried men in rural towns color="navy"> or to pimps for exploitation in brothels and cybersex dens.

If they are caught
running away from traffickers, China sends them back to North Korea, where they
face target="_blank" class="css-1g7m0tk" title rel="noopener noreferrer">torture
and incarceration in labor camps. With nowhere
to turn for help in China, they remain trapped in sex slavery.

An estimated
60 percent of female North Korean refugees in China are trafficked into the
sex trade, and increasingly coerced into cybersex, the London-based rights group
Korea Future Initiative said in target="_blank" class="css-1g7m0tk" title rel="noopener noreferrer">a
report in May.

“Girls aged
as young as 9 are forced to perform graphic sex acts and are sexually assaulted
in front of webcams, which are live-streamed to a paying global audience, many
of whom are believed to be South Korean men,” the
report said.

When she was
smuggled out of North Korea in spring 2017, Ms. Lee was told she would be waitressing
in China. When she arrived, her boss said her job was “chatting”
at the computer. Until then, she had never seen
a computer. She didn’t know what a webcam was. She was 18.

“I thought ‘chatting’
was some kind of bookkeeping with a computer,” said
Kim Ye-na, 23, who was smuggled out last November, believing she would pick
mushrooms in China. “I never imagined what it would
turn out to be.”

Both Ms. Lee
and Ms. Kim fled their captivity on Aug. 15.

Six days later,
they arrived in Vientiane, Laos, with a man who was paid $4,000 to smuggle them
across the China-Laos border. Waiting for them was the Rev. Chun Ki-won, a Christian
pastor from South Korea who funded and orchestrated their rescue.

The women agreed
to interviews while in Vientiane, using nicknames they were given on the run
to protect their privacy and avoid the North Korean government’s possible retaliation
against their relatives in the North. Though The New York Times could not independently
corroborate some details of their flight, recordings of online conversations
between Mr. Chun and the women made before their escape supported their accounts.

“Given China’s increasing crackdown on
undocumented foreigners, locking North Korean women in apartments for cybersex
has become a favorite way for human traffickers to exploit them,” color="navy">said Mr. Chun. “They drug the women
to dull their shame and make them work long hours.”

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Ms. Kim and Ms. Lee embracing the Rev. Chun Ki-won, a South Korean pastor. He
helped arrange for them to be smuggled out of China in August.CreditAdam Dean
for The New York Times

Out
of North Korea

Ms. Lee and Ms.
Kim were from North Korea’s “generation of the Arduous
March”: children born around the 1990s, when famine
wiped out 10 percent of the population. Barely out of elementary school, they
started working. Ms. Kim toiled in a jade mine and later joined the class="css-1g7m0tk" title>unofficial market color="navy">, selling fruits and South Korean clothes smuggled from China.
Ms. Lee collected and sold wild herbs.

As they grew
up, their hometown, Hyesan, and other towns along the narrow river border with
China became hunting ground for human traffickers. In 2017, a relative sold
Ms. Lee.

“I myself wanted
to go to China because I heard of girls gone there sending money to their families,” color="navy"> said Ms. Lee.

After changing
hands twice between human traffickers, Ms. Lee ended up with a man who held
five North Korean women captive in Helong, in northeast China.

Ms. Kim, too,
wanted a way out. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, had begun cracking down
on young merchants in the markets, hoping to drive them toward class="css-1g7m0tk" title>state-led building projects. color="navy"> A female smuggler whom Ms. Kim had befriended agreed to take
her to China.

At 4 a.m. on
Nov. 18, the smuggler, her brother and Ms. Kim were waiting at the border when
a soldier appeared out of the darkness. He told them the way was clear.

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By The New York Times

The smuggler
knew the path well, leading them across the icy, shallow river and through a
hole under the border fence. After walking 12 hours through hills, the smuggler
dug out a cellphone buried in the ground and made a call.

Hours later,
a woman appeared in a car. She handed Chinese cash, a bundle of shoes, clothes
and other items to the North Korean smuggler. Ms. Kim was being traded.

The woman who
bought Ms. Kim was also from Hyesan and worked for a sex trafficking ring, managing
a dozen webcam women, all from Hyesan, in apartments scattered around Gongzhuling,
in northeast China. She said Ms. Kim owed her 80,000 renminbi, or $11,160.

“She said I can go to to South Korea after
working for her three years,” Ms. Kim said. color="blue">“I heard that in South Korea, you can live decently if you work
real hard. That was all I was asking for.”

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Ms. Kim weeping as she recalls to Mr. Chun the abuse she suffered at the hands
of human traffickers in China. color="purple">CreditAdam Dean for The New
York Times

Into
Cybersex Slavery

Some of Ms. Lee’s
South Korean clients asked her to do sex acts too dehumanizing for her to describe.

“If I refused,
they called me dirty trash from North Korea,” she
said.

Other men took
pity on the women. Two of Ms. Lee’s clients regularly sent cash to her boss
so she could get some extra sleep.

Last December,
a woman disappeared from Ms. Lee’s place. The pimp said she had been lured
away by organ traffickers and must be dead, leaving the other women terrified.

Ms. Kim said
only two women were released from her apartment ? when both developed tuberculosis.
After being severely beaten, another two tried to escape from their sixth-floor
apartment by scaling down water pipes. The police soon arrested them, but the
pimp refused to pay bribes to stop their repatriation to North Korea. She was
making them a lesson for the others.

“She said, ‘Remember
how much your life here is better than the one you left behind in the North,’” color="navy"> Ms. Kim said.

Despite her slave-like
condition, Ms. Lee never thought of going back to North Korea. Her aim was to
get to South Korea and make enough money to smuggle her mother and a younger
sister out.

“I kept telling
myself, ‘Hang in there. When the time comes, you can make it to South Korea,’” color="navy"> she said.

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A North
Korean woman jumping from a third-floor window to flee her captors in China.
Credit color="purple">Durihana

Jump
for Freedom

In late 1995,
Mr. Chun, then a hotelier and not yet a pastor, was on a business trip to Hunchun,
a Chinese city on the border with North Korea, when he realized how dire circumstances
were. He saw the uncollected bodies of North Koreans fleeing famine, frozen
to death while crossing the river border; the Chinese police clubbing child
beggars to drive them away; a woman screaming for help as she was kidnapped
by two men.

Mr. Chun later
became a Christian missionary. Since 2000, he has brought 1,200 North Korean
refugees in China to South Korea, including many women trafficked into forced
marriages. In recent years, however, his target="_blank" class="css-1g7m0tk" title rel="noopener noreferrer">Durihana
mission in Seoul, the South’s capital, started
receiving anonymous online messages from women trapped in the cybersex dens
in China, and calls from men who wanted to rescue them.

One such call
was from an animal feed deliveryman in South Korea in July.

He sent Ms. Kim’s
boss 15 million South Korean won, or $12,360, to buy her freedom. But the smuggler
who promised to take Ms. Kim to South Korea sold her to a Chinese man in his
50s. The South Korean man sent another 15 million to Ms. Kim’s original boss
to free her from the forced marriage. By then, he realized he had been duped.

Around the same
time, Mr. Chun got a call from a man who wanted to help Ms. Lee. She also got
surprising news: The woman said to have been kidnapped by organ traffickers
contacted her through a webcam site. She had jumped from their third-floor apartment
and now lived in South Korea.

Mr. Chun contacted
Ms. Lee and Ms. Kim, pretending to be a client.

The woman who
had escaped helped Mr. Chun find Ms. Lee’s neighborhood. Ms. Kim memorized
the telephone number of a nearby restaurant that her boss once took her to.
By peeking out the windows, Ms. Lee and Ms. Kim identified as many landmarks
as possible to help Mr. Chun pinpoint their locations on Google Earth.

Mr. Chun then
sent seven volunteers to China, including two trafficking survivors.

On Aug. 15, one
team waited in a taxi outside Ms. Kim’s apartment and followed her, another
girl and their boss when a sudden water outage forced them to go out for food.
Ms. Kim pretended to be sick on their way back, vomiting on the sidewalk and
running into a public toilet. When the boss entered another stall, Ms. Kim rushed
out into the rescuers’ taxi and it sped away.

Asked what she
had wanted most, Ms. Kim said, “standing outside
in a pouring rain.” But days after leaving China,
she still had nightmares about being on the run, someone chasing her close behind.

On that same
August day in Helong, Ms. Lee slipped out of her room while her Chinese pimp
was out for drinks. Through the window of the living room, she saw an air mattress
and a rescuer beckoning. She climbed out, then hesitated.

“The height
was terrifying,” she said. “But
it was the only way out.”

She jumped.

In late August,
a black van stopped across the street from the South Korean Embassy of a Southeast
Asian country where defectors can apply for asylum. Holding Mr. Chun’s hands,
Ms. Lee and Ms. Kim got out and crossed the road, walking their last yards to
freedom. The steel gate slid open, and the girls stepped inside.

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Ms. Kim and Ms. Lee holding hands with Mr. Chun as he escorted them toward the
gate of a South Korean Embassy. color="purple">CreditAdam Dean for The New
York Times