Government must better protect foreign women from sexual exploitation

Experts attend a forum held in Seoul on Tuesday to mark the 20th anniversary of Korea’s anti-prostitution law. Korea Times photo by Jung Min-ho

Sex traffickers increasingly targeting non-Koreans and other vulnerable people: experts

By Jung Min-ho

According to experts, foreign women are one of the new prime targets of Korean sex traffickers, who are looking for vulnerable victims who pose a lower legal risk to them.

At the forum held on Tuesday to mark the 20th anniversary of the country’s anti-prostitution law, experts called on policymakers to take measures to better protect foreign women, the disabled and others vulnerable to sex traffickers.

Reliable data on how many foreign women are involved in sex trafficking is hard to come by. But according to an analysis of case law, foreign women were involved in more than 33 percent of all sex trafficking cases that went to trial in 2022, a jump from 24.4 percent in 2019. Thai women accounted for the most cases involving foreign women in 2022, it found.

“As it has become harder for sex traffickers to find targets amid growing awareness of the illegality and human rights abuses associated with sex trafficking, they are increasingly targeting foreign women, minors and people with intellectual and mental disabilities,” said Jang Lim Da-hye, a researcher at the Korea Institute of Criminology and Justice, a think tank.

Sex traffickers and pimps target non-Korean women for many reasons. The language barrier and the way such cases are typically investigated here are some of the obvious reasons.

By law, police and prosecutors are supposed to protect victims of sex trafficking while investigating and charging women who choose to do sex work for economic reasons. But drawing a clear line between the two groups has proven extremely difficult, experts say. And for cases involving foreign women, that’s even more so.

This is largely because Korean investigators focus primarily on whether the individuals involved can be charged, rather than investigating whether they were forced to do such work, a process that takes additional effort and time.

Members of a women’s rights group hold a rally in Seoul on Monday to mark the 20th anniversary of Korea’s anti-prostitution law. Yonhap

“Instead of asking in-depth questions to find out how the woman in question got into the sex trade, interpreters for the police would ask questions like, ‘Did you know what your work here would be?’ If the person says, ‘Yes,’ they assume the person consented to sex work, human rights activists say,” said Lee Mi-jung, a researcher at the Korean Women’s Development Institute, a think tank.

Experts at the event said systemic reforms are needed to better protect victims of sex trafficking. And to do that, policymakers should come up with better ways to figure out who should be considered a victim first, they said. Successful reform may require overhauling the current law, they added.

Experts said the anti-prostitution law has achieved some of its goals in the past 20 years. Most people now know that sex trafficking is a criminal offense; the highly visible red-light districts that once dotted many of Korea’s major cities have been largely tamed.

But despite these successes, the online sex industry continues to thrive, but this calls for a new approach.

As the country marked the 20th anniversary of the anti-prostitution law on Monday, seven women’s rights groups issued a joint statement calling on lawmakers to revise the current law to recognize the exploitative nature of sex trafficking and to classify all sex workers as victims, not criminals.