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| China-Japan-Koreas | |||
| North Korea food shortage boosts prostitution | |||
| 2013-11-30 | |||
Prostitution and human trafficking are rising so fast that prices are jumping quickly – generating significant inflation, Howard Young, an analyst on domestic conditions in North Korea, wrote on the NorthKorea.cafe24.com website.
Levels of prostitution in North Korea were suppressed and limited for the first 40 years of the stateÂ’s history after World War II. However, prostitution spread rapidly in the decade following the famine of the late 1990s under then-ruler Kim Jong-il, when as many as 3 million people starved to death. Since then, the Pyongyang regime has never been able to reassert its control over food production while providing a barely adequate food supply to everyone else. In the looser economic conditions since then, many thousands of young women have turned to the sex trade to earn enough money to eat. In recent years, harvests have been even poorer than usual in North Korea, owing to a combination of droughts, heat waves and fierce rains at unexpected times.
In recent years, the sex trade has metastasized, owing to the methamphetamine pandemic that has swept North Korea. As in other countries around the world, drug addiction and rapidly increased levels of prostitution go together. Female methamphetamine addicts increasingly turn to prostitution to get the money to pay for their habits. “Because domestic demand for the hard drugs has been growing rapidly, their prices have skyrocketed as well and this in turn has led young female addicts to demand higher prices from their customers to pay for their increasingly expensive drugs,” Hutchinson said. Current estimates by South Korean and U.S. analysts place the number of fulltime prostitutes throughout North Korea at around 25,000 in the state of 24.5 million people – a figure that Young agreed with. That would mean one full-time prostitute was working per 1,000 people. The high estimate does not include the far larger number of women who supplement their meager income by occasional freelance participation in prostitution activities. “Prostitution is a particularly difficult vice for even the best-organized communist government to suppress,” Hutchinson said. “The vice trade is based on a simple one-on-one transaction between the customer and the supplier of services,” he said. “This does not require an extensive infrastructure such as the drug trade requires. It also means that the privacy of the act and the basic human desires it serves, allow the opportunity for the security apparatus members and senior officers charged with repressing it to indulge freely themselves without any serious risk of compromise or arrest.” The age range of women involved in prostitution in North Korea is broad, stretching from 17 to 45, according to Young. The large percentage of women engaging in the practice again reflects the widespread and growing destitution and hunger pervading North Korean society. A North Korean defector said there are about 500 prostitutes in a city which has a population of 400,000, Young noted. “If [we] depend on the simple arithmetic calculation and put North Korean population as 20 million, we can assume that there should be about 25,000 prostitutes in North Korea.” A few years ago, that estimate would have been widely rejected as too high. The history of poor harvests, food shortages and the desperate demand for short-term extra income has made its mark. The hard drug pandemic may well have put those numbers too low. In any case, the boast North Korean spokesmen made until recent years that there was no prostitution in their country rings hollow. | |||
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #1 So is that what Rodman is doing over there? |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2013-11-30 11:23 |