hankyoreh

including sexual exploitation. One woman’s recent experience of having been lured to Korea on the pretext of marriage

“Natasha,” 29, came to South Korea on Nov. 9 of last year, leaving her 17-month-old daughter behind in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. As soon as she arrived at Incheon Airport, she headed straight to an inn in Seoul along with two other Uzbekistani women. “You have the massage the faces and feet of the customers, and you also have to prostitute yourselves,” explained the brokers who accompanied them, an ethnic Korean woman from Central Asia named “Kim” and a South Korean national broker named “Cho.”

The weeping Natasha protested that she could not do such a thing, but Kim and Cho took her to a red light district and told her, “If you don’t listen to us, we will sell you off here,” she recalled.

After spending over a month at that inn, she was moved in the middle of the night on Dec. 20 to a massage parlor in the Gojan neighborhood of Ansan, Gyeonggi Province. She asked an Uzbekistani friend in South Korea to report it to the police, and a week later, on Dec. 30, she finally succeeded at escaping along with six other female co-workers.

Natasha had earned the equivalent of 300,000 won (US$196) a month working at a restaurant in Tashkent. “I became interested when someone said I could earn 1.5 million won a month if I went to Korea, and I thought I would open a beauty salon in my hometown after I earned money,” she says, explaining how she had decided to come to South Korea, but she ended up with a deeply wounded body and heart, to say nothing of earning any money.

When this reporter met her at the Emergency Support Center for Migrant Women in Seoul’s Sinseol-dong on Feb. 20, she said in a tearful voice, “I’ve cried more tears in South Korea over the last four months than I had cried in my whole life before.”

The 3.5 million won she received at the business was taken by the brokers as expenses for immigration procedures, and she ended up receiving only a few 10,000 won notes at a time from the business as spending money when she bought cigarettes and sanitary napkins. The brokers even pushed her to pay back the 15 million won spent on her sham marriage with a Korean man.

Following Natasha’s report, the police began an investigation, but the two brokers had already fled, including Cho, and their whereabouts are currently unknown.

The police booked not only the six Korean men who entered sham marriages with the women for 3.5 million won each but also the six female victims, including Natasha, on charges of entering false data in electronic records.

In response, My Sister’s Place, a group that helps women victimized by prostitution, submitted a petition to the police Tuesday and held a protest. “The essence of this incident is that Natasha was lured in and tricked by human traffickers with the goal of sexual exploitation,” said Park Su-mi, head of the counseling office at My Sister’s Place. “The police should abide by the rules of protection in cases of human trafficking according to the definition of and recommendations for human trafficking designated by the United Nations,” Park added.

“Please let the police capture the traffickers so that there are no more victims like me,” Natasha said.

Natasha urgently wishes to return to her daughter in Uzbekistan as soon as possible, but even her homecoming has been put on hold while the police continue to investigate her case.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]