In a first, dozens of South Korean women who worked as prostitutes have filed a lawsuit accusing the United States military of illegally promoting the sex trade for decades and locking them up to forcibly treat them for sexually transmitted diseases.
In the lawsuit, announced in a news conference on Monday, the women demanded that the U.S. military apologize and pay damages for playing a hand in managing a vast network of prostitution around its bases in South Korea. Korean women who worked in bars and brothels frequented by American troops have reported rampant human rights violations.
In 2022, the women won a court ruling against their own government. South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered the government to compensate dozens of women for the trauma they endured as “comfort women for the U.S. military,” as they were once known. The court found the government guilty of encouraging prostitution for American G.I.s to help bring in badly needed U.S. dollars for the economy and maintain ties with the United States, on which it relied for security. It also said the government forced many women to receive treatment for sexually transmitted diseases in a “systematic and violent” way.
The latest lawsuit, which was filed at a Seoul court on Friday, was the first attempt by the women to hold the U.S. military accountable. The women and their lawyers said that the U.S. military was “the real culprit” in what was a state-sponsored sex trade, even allowing comfort women inside its bases and near its field training grounds.
On Monday, one 66-year-old woman said that she was 16 when she was sold to a pimp who catered to American G.I.s. She said that the U.S. military was aware that minors like her were brought into the trade through sex trafficking but did nothing to stop it.
She spoke at the news conference on the condition of anonymity, citing her fear of public shaming.
In South Korea, women like her have not won the kind of public sympathy extended to women forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Instead, they said they have had to live in shame and silence for decades. Korean society despised them, they said, treating them like a shameful underside of its alliance with the United States that it wanted to obscure.
They could not even sue the U.S. military directly; lawsuits seeking compensation from the U.S. troops based in South Korea must be settled with the local government. So the women sued their government again, this time for what the U.S. military did to them, each seeking 10 million won, or $7,200, in compensation.
Their real goal is to find the U.S. military culpable in a court of law of abusing them. For decades, South Korean women worked in so-called camp towns — clusters of licensed bars, brothels and shops that South Korea created to help contain prostitution for G.I.s, who paid in dollars, in the special zones.
The United States has stationed tens of thousands of troops in South Korea since the 1950-53 Korean War. Some of the women working in camp towns had been abducted and sold to pimps, while others were lured with the promise of work. All the women were held in debt bondage to pimps, according to scholars who studied the issue.
The South Korean Justice Ministry, the defendant in the suit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did the U.S. military command in the country. It has previously said that it did not condone or support prostitution or human trafficking.
Prostitution is illegal in South Korea. But local officials and U.S. military authorities gathered women for English and etiquette classes, according to some of the women and declassified South Korean government and U.S. military documents their lawyers submitted to the court as evidence. Local officials urged them to earn more dollars, calling them “patriots.” The U.S. military’s instructions for the women focused on protecting its troops from sexually transmitted diseases.
Under rules that the U.S. military and South Korean officials worked out, comfort women had to be tested twice a week, according to the women and unsealed documents. The U.S. military conducted random inspections at clubs, rounding up women without a valid registration or V.D. test card. The women had to wear numbered badges or name tags at clubs, and the U.S. military kept “hot sheets” — or photo files of the women — at base clinics to help infected soldiers identify contacts.
The infected women, but not their G.I. partners, were locked up in facilities with barred windows where they were heavily dosed with penicillin; some died of penicillin shock, according to the women. The U.S. military demanded the isolation of the women in such facilities, and the local government acquiesced, the women’s lawyers said, citing supporting documents.
Camp towns have slowly faded with South Korea’s rapid economic development. But the women’s lawyers said that some of the activities described in the lawsuit continued until 2004.
Imagine if the turbolibs that made the lemmy knock-off piefed got bagged too just for being guilty by association