Human Trafficking In South Korea Essay

When you think of South Korea, you most likely think of its lively capital, Seoul. When you think of Seoul, you think of a bustling city much like New York. When you think of New York, one of the things you might instantly think of is traffic. Seoul has immense amounts of traffic as well. However, I am not going to talk about the kind of traffic that makes you honk your horn and swear at the person in front of you, I am going to talk about a type of traffic that is much, much worse—human trafficking. South Korea is not known worldwide for human trafficking like Thailand is, but that does not mean that human trafficking is not an issue in South Korea. On the contrary, it is still prevalent in Seoul today. Underneath the hustle and bustle of

South Korea is a portion of that statistic, as is every other country in the world. No country is safe from this horrendous monster; yet, everyone seems to shy away from doing anything about it. While it may affect some countries or regions more than others, it still affects places in every corner of the globe.

While the human trafficking statistics for South Korea seem to be decreasing, it is not over. Statistics on human trafficking are not always exact; it is an extremely underground enterprise—a multi-million dollar enterprise that needs to be discussed much more often. This is what the intent of this paper is—to discuss the major issues of both labor and sex trafficking in South Korea. According to humantrafficking.org one of the reasons that South Korea is still having issues with human trafficking is because “South Korea lacks a clear law prohibiting all forms of trafficking”

According to June JH Lee’s research in his work entitled Human Trafficking in East Asia: Current Trends, Data Collection, and Knowledge Gaps, “The end of the cold war, the onset of economic development in China and the growing global market integration of the region, meant that the more developed parts of Asia…started to experience sever labour shortages”(Lee).

Lee also mentions that “the trafficking routes in the region indicate that origins and destinations tend to come from less-developed to more developed countries” (Lee) which makes South Korea “one of the four main destination countries in Asia” (Lee).

South Korea has people, both men and women, from many countries including “Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Columbia, Mongolia, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, North Korea, Vietnam, and Japan” (HumanTrafficking) that enter the country for either employment opportunities or marriage, which brings us into the next topic, sex trafficking.

As was stated earlier, labor trafficking is much less documented than sex trafficking is, so we will now move on to the much more highly noted issue of sex trafficking. I will mainly be discussing the effervescent issue of sex slaves around United States Military