Women's rights in North Korea

Overview

In North Korea, women were expected to give birth to and rear male heirs to assure the continuation of the family line. Women had few opportunities to participate in the social, economic, or political life of society. There were a few exceptions to limitations imposed on women's roles. For example, female shamans were called on to cure illnesses by driving away evil spirits, to pray for rain during droughts, or to perform divination and fortune-telling.^[1]

Before 1945, academic education was not important for women, only few women received any formal education in traditional Korean society. After the opening of Korea to foreign contact in the late nineteenth century, however, Christian missionaries established girls' schools, thus allowing young Korean females to obtain a modern education.^[1]

The social status and roles of women were radically changed after 1945. On July 30, 1946, authorities north of the thirty-eighth parallel passed a Sex Equality Law. The 1972 constitution asserted that "women hold equal social status and rights with men." The 1990 constitution stipulates that the state creates various conditions for the advancement of women in society. In principle, North Korea strongly supports sexual equality.^[1]

In contemporary North Korea, women are expected to fully participate in the labor force outside the home. Apart from its ideological commitment to the equality of the sexes, the government views women's employment as essential because of the country's labor shortage. No able-bodied person is spared from the struggle to increase production and compete with the more populous southern half of the peninsula. According to one South Korean source, women in North Korea are supposed to devote eight hours a day to work, eight hours to study (presumably, the study of chuch'e and Kim Il Sungism), and eight hours to rest and sleep. Women who have three or more children apparently are permitted to work only six hours a day and still receive a full, eight-hour-a-day salary.^[1]

Women are not fully emancipated. Sons are still preferred over daughters. Women do most if not all of the housework, including preparing a morning and evening meal, in addition to working outside the home; much of the responsibility of childrearing is in the hands of t'agaso and the school system. The majority of women work in light industry, where they are paid less than their male counterparts in heavy industry. In office situations, they are likely to be engaged in secretarial and other low-echelon jobs.^[1]

Different sex roles, moreover, are probably confirmed by the practice of separating boys and girls at both the elementary and higher middle-school levels. Some aspects of school curricula for boys and girls also are apparently different, with greater emphasis on physical education for boys and on home economics for girls. In the four-year university system, however, women majoring in medicine, biology, and foreign languages and literature seem especially numerous.^[1]

The War on women in North Korea

The evils of North Korea are well-chronicled from its political prison camps to the needless and preventable starvation deaths of between 450,000 and 2 million people. That latter estimate comes from an exhaustive report by a U.N. Commission of Inquiry, which found the North Korean government responsible for “crimes against humanity, arising from ‘policies established at the highest level of State,’"including “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.” What is less well-known, however, it that it is North Korea’s women — particularly those on the low rungs of the songbun system, which categorizes North Koreans by their fealty to the regime — who suffer the most. Many are forced into prostitution by extreme poverty. Due to the unavailability of medical care and drugs, some have turned to opium in the false hope that it can prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Thousands more flee to China as refugees and fall prey to traffickers.^[2]

Women also suffer the worst cruelties in North Korea’s prison camps. A woman named Kim Hye-sook told the U.N. Commission that “the women who worked in the mines of Political Prison Camp No. 18 feared assignment to the night shift, because guards and prisoners preyed on them on their way to and from work and rape them.” Another witness “reported that the guards of Camp No. 18 were especially targeting teenage girls.” A former guard told of “how the camp authorities made female inmates available for sexual abuse to a very senior official who regularly visited the camp,” and that “after the official raped the women, the victims were killed.” A former guard at Camp 16 told Amnesty International that “several women inmates disappeared after they had been raped by officials,”^[2] and concluded “that they had been executed secretly.” Indeed, the Commission found violence against women to be pervasive in North Korean society:

318. Witnesses have testified that violence against women is not limited to the home, and that it is common to see women being beaten and sexually assaulted in public. Officials are not only increasingly engaging in corruption in order to support their low or non-existent salaries, they are also exacting penalties and punishment in the form of sexual abuse and violence as there is no fear of punishment. As more women assume the responsibility for feeding their families due to the dire economic and food situation, more women are traversing through and lingering in public spaces, selling and transporting their goods. The male dominated state, agents who police the marketplace, inspectors on trains and soldiers are increasingly committing acts of sexual assault on women in public spaces. The Commission received testimony that while rape of minors is severely punished in the DPRK, the rape of adults is not really considered a crime.^[2]

Daily life in North Korea

North Korea is highly patriarchal. For example, women are advised not to visit to other houses on 1 January as it is considered bad luck. It is also bad luck for a shop if the first customer of the day is female. In the past, women faced criticism if their husbands were seen in the kitchen, though things might have gotten slightly better these days.^[3]

North Korean men are expected to go to work early every morning, even if they don’t get paid. It is thought to be appropriate and ideal that men obey this policy of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), even if the family has nothing to eat.^[3]

Therefore women, and not men, are expected to take care of everything that happens within the house. No matter how hard it is to make a living, the only duty men are expected to perform at home is to ban family members from doing anything against the policies of the WPK.^[3] In other words, it is thought that the role of men is to teach their wives and children so that they will not do anything that interferes with party ideology, even if they’re on the verge of starving to death. This is often reflected in divorce cases. If a husband or wife does anything contrary to party ideology, even to make a living, this is considered grounds for divorce.

Also, a WPK membership card is something you don’t show, even to your spouse, because party ideology is considered far more important than the affection between husband and wife. Men are expected to be able to maintain a distinction between their public and personal lives. Women shouldn’t want to know about the things happening to their men out of house.^[3]

And if husbands are violent towards their wives the government doesn’t interfere, leaving women to bear the consequences alone. In my hometown, I’d say domestic violence occurred on a daily basis in three out of 10 households, and less often in others.^[3]

Famous Women in North Korea

Kim Hwa Suk

Kim Hwa Suk is a woman who graduated from middle school and decided to work in the fields as a farmer in Pyongyang, she gradually rose to position of responsibility as her talent and dedication became known after she became a leader of youth work team, she attended university after graduating, she became chairperson of her cooperative's management board. Kim was also chosen as a deputy to the Supreme People's Assembly. Media in North Korea made a big propaganda for her and tried to show her as a role model for every North Korean woman.^[1]

Ri Chun-hee

Ri Chun-hee is the most famous woman in North Korea. She's the only lady North Korea trusts to deliver the most important propaganda

She has appeared on television screens around the world whenever the secretive nation wants to boast about its latest achievements.

Although the 69-year-old was believed to be in semi-retirement, the veteran news anchor was wheeled out again lately by the country's dictator Kim Jung Un to claim that North Korea had carried out hydrogen bomb tests.^[4]

Hong Un-jong

Hong Un-jong is a North Korean artistic gymnast. She is the 2008 Olympics champion and 2014 World Champion on Vault.^[5]

Won Ok-Im

Won Ok-Im is a North Korean Judoka. She won a bronze medal in the half-middleweight category at the 2006 asian games, having defeated Battugs Tumenod of Mongolia in the bronze medal match. She also won a bronze medal at 2008 Beijing Olympics. She currently resides in Pyongyang.^[5]

Prostitution in North Korea

The great famine of the 1990s changed the North Korean society deeply that the world is still trying to understand the width and the depth of that change. During and after the famine, millions of North Koreans grasped at any survival strategy necessary to feed themselves. Those who did not change, and whom the state did not feed, died. For thousands of North Korean women, prostitution was the survival strategy of last way to feed themselves, and often, their children.^[6]

In Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, the sex trade was invisible to the outside world. That began to change when Chinese traffickers and johns forced thousands of female famine refugeesinto the sex trade. By the end of the great famine, prostitution had become stealthily ubiquitous inside North Korea. It also became more organized and more predatory, with state officials playing a growing role its patronage and protection.^[6]

In Hamheung in 2008, a number of high-ranking party officials were accused of patronizing a tea house that also sold sex, and for protecting it against police interference. In Hyesan in 2009, the manager of a state-run inn frequently patronized by central party officials was arrested for pimping women and girls, some in their mid-teens. North Korea’s 2009 currency “reform” drove more women into the sex trade. By 2010, prostitution in Chongjin had been organized by “couple managers” who matched customers, often soldiers, with sex workers, often female university students, and sometimes women who had become dependent on drugs. Last year, the manager of a North Korean factory in China was accused of pimping out female factory workers.^[6]

The reports do not suggest that the state has consciously chosen to tolerate or profit from the sex trade as a matter of policy. The security forces periodically crack down on the sex trade, but inevitably, when corrupt authorities attempt to police a profitable trade, the authorities begin to see that trade as just another way to supplement their pay. More fundamentally, in a society where officials are the law, where enforcement is arbitrary, and where the state profits from trade at least indirectly, it can be hard to tell the difference between corruption and state policy. Today, the Daily NK reports that prostitution is increasingly run by well-connected businessmen and protected by the officials they’re connected with.^[6]

North Korean society’s acceptance of prostitution will probably remain until long after unification; after all, prostitution still carries on more-or-less openly in South Korea, under terms that can also be very exploitative. Different societies take different views on whether the sex trade, at least between consenting and unmarried adults, is inherently evil, but the conditions in which North Korean women must sell their bodies is unquestionably evil. Their working conditions are horrible — for the obvious reasons, of course, but also for the general lack of health care available to those who became pregnant, or contract STDs. Some turn to addictive drugs, in the false hope that they can protect them from contracting disease.

The role of state officials in organizing and profiting from the sex trade is repellant, but still not as repellant as the state’s role in creating the conditions that force women into prostitution to begin with. Women who ought to be doctors should not be sex workers. Of North Korea’s many tragedies, there may be none greater than all the human potential destroyed by its unjust and unequal political system.^[6]

A North Korean defector informed Ha Tae-kyung, a lawmaker of the Saenuri Party and publisher specializing in North Korea, that were approximately 500 prostitutes in their city, which has a population of 400,000.^[7]

“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,” Ha told Sieff.^[7]

Point Of View

Finally, after all the research made on women rights in North Korea, It's easy to discern that most rights there are taken away from women, they don't get enough care since the day they are born, especially if they have a brother; he gets all the care from the parents, better education, more money, even better treatment.

North Korean girls are taught that they are going to grow up to be mothers and housewives, they are forced into working outside the house for six to eight hours a day plus they are responsible for everything in the house like cooking, cleaning and taking care of the kids.

They don't even have the rights to dream, their best dream would be getting married to a rich guy so the don't have to work daily regular hours so she can just worry about her house and kids; is this even fair?

References