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Women in North Korea are regularly subjected to sexual violence by government officials, prison guards, interrogators, police, prosecutors and soldiers, with trial and error, according to a new report unwanted in the daily life of women working in the black country booming markets.
The widespread nature of abuses by North Korean officials has been documented in a new report by Human Rights Watch that has interviewed 54 people who have fled North Korea since 2011, the year of the year. came to power of Kim Jong-un. It took more than two years to accumulate the stories gathered in the report, with topics interviewed in Asian countries.
The men in power act with impunity and "when a guard or a police officer" chooses "a woman, she has no choice but to comply with all her requests, be it sexual intercourse, financial or other, "says the report.
Human rights violations in North Korea have been widely documented and the United Nations estimates that between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners are being held in four large political prison camps in North Korea.
A UN historical report details cases of "extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, transference forced population, enforced disappearance of inhumane act to knowingly cause prolonged famine ".
But women remain particularly vulnerable in a country where police, market inspectors and soldiers are mostly men. While Kim is committed to focusing more on the development of North Korea's economy, black markets, which have become a vital source of income for many families, are one of the places where Sexuality is rampant.
Oh Jung-hee, a shopkeeper interviewed by Human Rights Watch, described the prevalence of abuse where market watchmen and police "considered us [sex] toys. "
"It happens so often that nobody thinks it's a big problem," she said. "We do not even realize when we're upset. But we are human and we feel it. So sometimes, from nowhere, you cry at night and you do not know why.
Many women felt that the abuse they suffered was so normalized that almost no one thought of filing a complaint against the perpetrators. Only one woman reported her case to the police, others claiming that the police would not have acted.
Many women are sexually assaulted after being arrested while they were trying to cross China for work or sometimes to flee the north.
Park Young-hee, a farmer, was sent back to North Korea after being apprehended by Chinese police. During her interrogation, she stated that the officer "made me sit very close to him and touched me over my clothes and underneath. He also touched me between my legs and put his fingers inside me over and over during different days. "
She felt that her life was in danger and that her fate was in the hands of the interrogator and that she had no choice but to answer her questions, sometimes sexually explicit.
North Korea is trying to portray itself as a socialist paradise without crime and, in a document submitted to the United Nations last year, only five people were convicted of rape in 2015 and seven in 2011.
But Human Rights Watch's report paints a different picture. Eight women who were former detainees reported having been subjected to "sexual, verbal and physical abuse" by the authorities.
"After this report, North Korea can no longer say that sexual violence does not exist. So they have to change their tone or solve the problem, "said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "Kim Jong-un could stop that, he could enforce the laws already in force in North Korea."
The question is so little discussed in North Korea that researchers have discovered that concepts such as domestic violence and sexual violence have no clear definition. The North Korean language is based on a multitude of euphemisms that often downplay the gravity of the act.
