A Brutal Sex Trade Built for American Soldiers [View all]

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/world/asia/korea-us-comfort-women-sexual-slavery.html

The euphemism “comfort women” typically describes Korean and other Asian women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during World War II. But the sexual exploitation of another group of women continued in South Korea long after Japan’s colonial rule ended in 1945 — and it was facilitated by their own government.

There were “special comfort women units” for South Korean soldiers, and “comfort stations” for American-led U.N. troops during the Korean War. In the postwar years, many of these women worked in gijichon, or “camp towns,” built around American military bases.

Last September, 100 such women won a landmark victory when the South Korean Supreme Court ordered compensation for the sexual trauma they endured. It found the government guilty of “justifying and encouraging” prostitution in camp towns to help South Korea maintain its military alliance with the United States and earn American dollars.

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“The Americans need to know what some of their soldiers did to us,” said Park Geun-ae, who was sold to a pimp in 1975, when she was 16, and said she endured severe beatings and other abuse from G.I.s. “Our country held hands with the U.S. in an alliance and we knew that its soldiers were here to help us, but that didn’t mean that they could do whatever they wanted to us, did it?”