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Someone just sent me these articles and I read all of them. I've read about sex-trafficking before, but from other coutries and regions; now I realize this topic also includes South Korea.

The articles go in reverse order, so start with the bottom one of the four and go up:
http://www.sfgate.com/sextrafficking/

These articles follow one young South Korean woman's story. She went into a big debt and was tricked into thinking she got a good American job to pay off her loans. She was then smuggled into the USA and told that she would have to pay off thousands of dollars in debts to her employers for her plane tickets, food, and clothes. She then forced to have sex with more than a dozen men a day. By the time she is finally free, she's only 23 years old.

Does anyone else have more information on this? South Korea officially made it illegal to buy or sell women in 2004 (so recently!) according to this newspaper. After making this illegal, however, many people who were selling women went underground.

This isn't just prostitution, though. Many women *choose* to go tino this line of work, even if they may not be happy with it. The women sex-trades are more often than not *coerced* into prostitution.

Actually, after talking with more people I realized that the sex industry has been rather bustling for quite a while, particularly around American military bases and a few places where Japanese occupiers had set up large brothels.

It seems like a large part of this has to do with the lack of opportunities for gainful employment, particularly for poor uneducated women. Even now, the idea of going to college for a woman is often more about adding to her status and finding a good husband, rather than taking on career goals herself.

Of course, South Korea isn't the only country where women are taken from and the USA is not the only country that takes women from South Korea. And the relationship between South Korea and the USA in this case is two way. As somsone else said, if you stop the trade of women from South Korea to the USA, the underground trades will just find women from elsewhere, as so long as there is demand at their brothels.

The article was apparantly sparked because in a recent crackdown of San Francisco "massage parlors," all the women discovered by the police were from South Korea. Most of the women had no idea where they were, and were brought into this line of work unwillingly - threatened that they're families will be harassed, assaulted, or even just told about what their daughter is doing.

Here is a response to the article from someone in the Korean American community in San Francisco:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/24/EDG6PKE07C1.DTL&hw=sex+trafficking+open&sn=003&sc=738

Wow.... Just wow. I didn't think this world could be even more unbearable to live in until I read this. However, I don't see how killing myself is going to do anything to stop the F***ING A**H**** from doing the things they do. WOMEN'S RIGHTS!