But the flourishing markets have a dark side: a prey-and-predator relationship between the mostly female traders and male officials who extort bribes and demand sexual favours from them, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Thursday.
“Having sex with men who have power over you, or letting them touch all over your body, is a necessity to survive,” a former trader in her 20s told the rights group.
Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth releasing the report into sexual abuse against women in North Korea.
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“It never occurred to me that I could or would want to do anything about it. It was just how things are.”
Human Rights Watch said it interviewed 29 women who fled North Korea after Kim took power, and who agreed to discuss the abuse they suffered at the hands of North Korean officials.
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They all used pseudonyms to protect their privacy and family members left behind in the North.
Since famine devastated their country in the 1990s, 32,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea, most of them women. Many reported widespread sexual violence in their home country.
In 2014, a United Nations commission documented systematic human rights violations in the North, including sexual violence.
The Human Rights Watch report reinforced those findings, focusing exclusively on sexual abuse by men in positions of official power.
