Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Demophobe]

[RachaelRoo]

[Demophobe]

[Satori]

So all 70 of these girls magically decided to come up with the slavery story eh? I doubt they were all interviewed in the same location, I doubt they ever had a chance to all get together to "get thier story straight"...

[Guri Guy]

It is certainly not out of the question that they were sex slaves. This is a fairly common thing in Korea (and all over Asia) unfortunately.

Thousands of Korean women trafficked

Thousands of Korean women are being lured by internet adverts and then trafficked to the US and other countries, and sexually exploited. Timothy C. Lim, associate professor from California State University�s Department of Political Science, reported to an international symposium in Seoul that �it wasn�t difficult to conclude that a minimum 5,000 Korean women in the United States are either victims of sex trafficking or who otherwise trapped or entangled in situations of prostitution such that they are not free to leave, even if they came to the United States voluntarily.�
�Most or all were lured to the United States by Internet sites, newspaper advertisements, and word of mouth. Many of these ads made extraordinary promises: $5,000 a month to work in Guam, read one advertisement. $7,200 monthly to work in a Los Angeles salon, with guaranteed entrance to a �state government vocational school,� said another.
�The naivete of women who are fooled by outlandish promises in Internet or newspaper ads may be hard to swallow, and more in-depth examination may prove that a little skepticism is, in fact, a good thing� most of the Korean women who respond to these advertisements have limited education: junior high school and some high school,� he said. Canada is being used as a hub to traffick Korean women into the US, with many arriving in British Columbia.

http://www.businesstravellers.org/page/5/

A federal air marshal was arrested Tuesday on charges he played a role in a human trafficking ring that officials say worked out of a Flushing nightclub.

Byungki Koo, 33, of Fresh Meadows, surrendered to officials Tuesday after he was indicted on charges that he tried to obstruct the probe of a slavery operation that investigators believe was based out of the Renaissance Bar at 35-28 154th St.

The latest charges in the case are another indication that federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, who first indicted the Renaissance owners last year on assorted slavery and trafficking charges, are ramping up the probe.

Investigators with the Brooklyn U.S. attorney's office have been following leads back to South Korea through the banking system and in other parts of Queens as part of a growing probe of the nightclub scene catering to Asian immigrants, sources familiar with the case said.

The indictment unsealed Tuesday accused Koo of trying to kidnap a woman. He was charged with obstructing enforcement of the federal peonage law, which covers the use of forced labor to pay off debts. Koo was believed to be working as an air marshal when he allegedly committed the crime, a source said.

At Koo's arraignment Tuesday, his attorney entered a not guilty plea for him. Magistrate-Judge Joan Azrack ordered Koo temporarily held until Koo can come up with an acceptable bail proposal.

Koo faces at least 20 years in prison if convicted, prosecutors said.

NEW YORK -- An air marshal helped the suspects in a human trafficking case try to kidnap one of their victims to stop her from testifying against them, federal prosecutors charged Tuesday.

Byungki Koo became the second federal law enforcer charged with helping Kyongja and Wun Hee Kang try to evade charges that they lured two young women from Korea to work as hostesses at their bar in Queens. The women say they were physically and sexually assaulted after they refused to have sex with customers.

The Kangs were charged last year with crimes that include violating forced-labor laws by confiscating the women's passports and forcing them to work for free to pay off tens of thousands of dollars in travel expenses.

Customs and Border Protection marine inspector Nisim Yushuvayev was charged with obstructing the investigation by trying to take one victim to John F. Kennedy International Airport against her will and send her back to Korea.

Koo pleaded not guilty Tuesday to conspiracy and obstruction charges that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Freedman said stemmed from his involvement in the deportation plot. He was ordered held without bail.

Defense attorney Denis McAllister said Koo, who knew Yushuvayev from work, served only as an interpreter for the Kangs in their conversations with Yushuvayev.

Koo could face as much as 20 years in prison if convicted. He was placed on immediate administrative leave with pay, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman said.

An attorney for Wun Hee Kang said last year the case resulted from a cultural misunderstanding of a business arrangement common in Korea.



Human trafficking originating in South Korea? Obstruction of justice by one with a badge? Shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you.

Wun Hee Kang's lawyer says it's a cultural misunderstanding - who's misunderstood? The Koreans that own the bar? The Koreans that were kidnapped? The Homeland Security employee / Korean interpreter that was indicted? What's to misunderstand? (Perhaps I'm misunderstanding?)

I'm not naive enough to think this doesn't happen here - if there's a troublemaker running his/her mouth on the soon-to-be-off-limits Hill, or a factory down in Podunk-dong, it wouldn't surprise me if some low-level government flunky was paid off to send the problem back home.

While DoD seems intent on cracking down on human-trafficking and prostitution (and USFK is in lock-step with this intent), it's not a DoD problem. It's not a DoJ or DoS problem - heck, it's not even an American problem. It's a worldwide problem.

I'll admit to having thought that human trafficking and prostitution was a third-world problem (and naturally, the "Hub of Asia�" isn't a third-world nation). In the long run, it's good that two countries that don't want to deal with problem now will be forced to address it - and perhaps not on the self-flaggellation on the soap-box we're used to seeing from one side of the Pacific.

http://www.rokus.net/article100.html

On the other hand:

�The naivete of women who are fooled by outlandish promises in Internet or newspaper ads may be hard to swallow, and more in-depth examination may prove that a little skepticism is, in fact, a good thing� most of the Korean women who respond to these advertisements have limited education: junior high school and some high school,� he said.

Quoting U.S. Department of State�s last year report on trafficking in persons, he said Canada, particularly British Columbia, was used as a hub for east Asian traffickers along with Mexico.

Sealing Cheng, Henry Luce assistant professor, Wellesley College Department of Women�s Studies, told the symposium that there was a need to understand the factors that generated people who were ready to take the risk of migrating to a foreign country for opportunities that might be dangerous.

�If most Korean victims of trafficking are women, then we may need to look at the opportunities for women in Korea and their limitations that encourage unsafe migration overseas. It may not so much be innocence, as much as ambition and desires to improve one�s life, that people embrace the opportunities that traffickers have to offer,� she said.

http://tfgwebmaster.web.aplus.net/wwwthefuturegrouporg/

[Matman]

Of course sexual slavery exists, especially in third world countries where individual choice and freedom is much more limited, but most of the sexual slavery stories that do the rounds in the western media turn out to be nonsense. The world is more complicated than evil pimp beasts are their innocent little victims.

Massaging The Facts

Mian Rige

Spectator

On 29 September a troop of broad-shouldered policewomen stormed in to Cuddles Massage Parlour on Birmingham�s Hagley Road, and emerged with 19 skinny foreign women. It was suspected they had been held as sex slaves. The policeman leading the raid, Detective Inspector Mark Nevitt, said he feared the women had been lured to Britain by people traffickers �on false pretences, sold on, and held against their will�. There were reports of electric fencing at the back of the property, to prevent the girls escaping, and of a house nearby, where they were locked up during the day. Some of the girls had had their passports taken away, it was said.

Fleet Street loved it, of course; several newspapers �splashed� on the story � �Sex slaves freed� was the favourite headline. Human rights groups � including several dedicated to the fight against �trafficking�, or trading, in women � similarly expressed outrage at the women�s fate and applauded the police�s action. Amnesty International described it as a �crackdown on traffickers and their vicious trade in women who are held prisoner and forced to work as prostitutes�.

If all this suggested that sex slavery was rife in Britain, so, though less stridently, has the government. The other week Britain and Sweden, which recently criminalised prostitution, hosted a much-hyped seminar on trafficking, in Brussels. In the run-up to it Tony McNulty, a Home Office minister, warned that men who pay for sex with trafficked women could be charged with rape.

That should put the wind up quite a few British men, who increasingly use prostitutes, most of whom are foreign. According to surveys reported in the Lancet, in 1990 2.1 per cent of men aged 16�44 years admitted to having paid for sex in the previous five years; in 2000 the figure was 4.3 per cent. A better quality service, thanks to an increase in foreign competition, may have contributed to the rise. According to a survey of massage parlours and saunas in London last year, less than a fifth of working girls were British � with many more hailing from Eastern Europe.

I recently journeyed to Cuddles Massage Parlour. A drab Victorian terrace house, fronted by a yellow sign bearing its sad name, Cuddles was locked and boarded up. Its garden and the electric fence supposedly ringing it were hidden from view. But a friendly newsagent a couple of doors down said he had been surprised to hear that the place was a prison. Its hookers came freely to his shop to buy sweets and cigarettes, he said, �and they always looked quite happy�.

A brief tour of Birmingham�s massage parlours � happily, my Pakistani minicab driver, Mohammed, seemed to know them all � offered little more illumination. Their names were Cuddles-esque cloying. Among the signs on their darkened windows were stencils of naked women and offers of aromatherapy. Yet even if I had wanted an innocent lavender-scented rubdown, as a woman and a journalist, I was unwelcome. The ritual never varied: first I pressed a sticky buzzer on the front door and gained entrance to a small hallway blocked by another locked door, and another buzzer. And that was as far as I ever got. Once, a middle-aged woman, heavily made up, had the manners to open the second door, but only to tell me, �I�m sorry, darling, you can�t come in.�

Post-Cuddles, such caution was understandable. But it should not suggest that the walls of Birmingham�s brothels are lined with manacled Eastern European women. Nor even was Cuddles. Within a few days of the raid, 13 of the girls (whom newspapers had persisted in describing as having been �rescued� even as it reported this development) were released, having assured police that they had been working voluntarily. The other six were moved to Yarlswood detention centre in Bedfordshire, after it was found that they were in Britain illegally. In addition, two men and a woman were charged with running a brothel and with firearms offences, but not with trafficking. According to Cari Mitchell of the English Collective of Prostitutes, a support group for sex workers which is communicating with the women sent to Yarlswood, �the girls made it quite clear that they were working consensually�. In her analysis, �the police have been able to get away with what was essentially an immigration raid being presented as a heroic effort to stop trafficking�.

This was good news, you might have thought, for the anti-trafficking lobby, which had offered many grim hypotheses on the girls� sufferings. Yet their response seemed hardly to show it. In a joint press release issued in response to the news that the six girls were in Yarlswood, Amnesty International and Anti-Slavery International spoke of their fears for the women who had been �rescued�. Mary Cunneen, director of Anti-Slavery International, said it was not surprising that the women had said they had not been trafficked � they may have been warned to stay silent.

Maybe they had been. But the fact remains that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the number of foreign women forcibly put to prostitution in Britain seems to be very low. The government has made only one serious estimate of the figure: according to a report released by the Home Office, in 1998, between 142 and 1,420 women �may have been� trafficked into the UK and coerced into prostitution. Naturally, newspapers routinely quote only the higher end of the estimate.

For sure, there is confusion in defining the crime. If a woman is brought into Britain illegally and is more or less free when she gets here, she has been smuggled. But if she arrives to find herself forced into prostitution, she is said to have been trafficked. Between the two crimes is a broad grey area: what if, on arrival in Britain, an illegal immigrant, supremely vulnerable yet not enslaved, is urged to prostitute herself as the easiest way to pay back her smugglers? It is a grim scenario; yet most research, including much that is anecdotal, suggests that it is also rare. Detective Constable Matthew Allwork, of the Metropolitan Clubs and Vice Squad, told me that, in his experience, the �vast majority� of foreign women working as prostitutes in London had freely chosen to do so � whether or not they were paying debt-bonds to traffickers.

In continental Europe the problem is similarly hyped, because it is under-researched, and yet the anecdotal evidence is the same. A senior European Union official, who has interviewed hundreds of young women, many of them Ukrainian and Moldovan, in deportation centres across Europe, describes speaking to several girls who had been trafficked and tricked into prostitution to pay off debt-bonds for the fourth or fifth time. Of those still illegally at large, he said, �Their new lives are not filled with joy, but these girls aren�t idiots. They have made a choice, in an exceedingly narrow range of choices. In that sense they are victims, and so are many British prostitutes.�

Hearing this from prostitutes, foreign or otherwise, is not as straightforward as you might imagine. Those interviewed by journalists tend either to have been given sanctuary by charities, and are therefore unusual, or, worse, to have been paid for their conversation by male reporters. Yet here�s a story, told by a friend of mine, that may contain useful truths.

Heartbroken after a failed love affair, he resolved to visit a prostitute � for him, an uncharacteristic decision. Having called a number advertised in a public telephone box, he was directed to a bedsit flat in Chelsea, the home of an attractive brunette whom we might call Natalia. She claimed at first to be half-French, half-Polish, and 18 years old � and indeed her room was decorated like a teenage girl�s, with pink walls and a fluffy teddy bear on the floor. But as she and my friend proceeded to chat over glasses of cranberry juice, she admitted to being in her early thirties and Lithuanian. She had lied about her age for an obvious reason, and about her nationality, she explained, because Eastern European prostitutes, being most common in London, were least well paid.

Natalia earned �200 a trick � much more than she would have earned in a massage parlour � of which �50 went to the agent who had referred my friend to her. And she proceeded to tell him the story of her life. Born in a grim port town, her alcoholic father had abandoned her mother when she was a child. Reaching young adulthood, she had by some, perhaps dubious, means travelled to Italy, where she married a local man and had his child. He beat her, so she left him and proceeded with another man to London. After he abandoned her, she dispatched her child home to her mother, and started selling herself.

It was not a happy business to be in, said Natalia. But it was her choice, she made clear, and it was at least much better than being married to an Italian thug. When she had earned enough money, she intended to retire and go to college � although she had no idea what she might study there. My friend suggested Russian literature; she replied that she had found Dostoevsky too difficult, but loved the English film of Dr Zhivago.

And so it continued for two hours: my friend listening and offering career advice to a hooker from the shores of the Baltic Sea. After which neither of them wanted to consummate their transaction. And, against my friend�s protestations, Natalia insisted he take back the �200 he had given her. As a flash of honour and mutual respect in a mostly rank and exploitative industry, it must be an exceptional exchange. Yet the woman that it reveals, exploited and introduced to prostitution, but accepting this as a choice that she had made, may be typical � and very much more common, certainly, than the sex slaves imagined to have been toiling in that Birmingham brothel.

[Bo Peabody]

***

[juicyhumdinger]

so Korea exports prostitutes, and Amerika exports English teachers. . .

erm. . .

[Junior]

[quote="RachaelRoo"]

[numazawa]

Who you callin' angry? Why, I oughtta ... Eh? Sarcastic? Yeah, right!

[Mashimaro]

[laogaiguk]

[wylies99]

Comparing teaching English in Korea to prostitution? Well, I guess there ARE SOME similiarities.

[Hollywoodaction]