At the recent North Korea summit, Kim Jong-un was accompanied by four women, including his own sister. People unfamiliar with North Korea might hope that portends good things regarding gender equality in North Korea.

Bustle reported that, “The presence of these four women is intriguing, but some speculate that their participation could be a strategy primarily intended to impress other world leaders and change how they perceive North Korea.”

I’m hardly a world leader, but I’m not that impressed. That’s because the lives of women in North Korea are hellish, waking nightmares (albeit, if Trump is to be believed, with great views of the beach).

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Those cute cheerleaders for North Korea that people loved at the Olympics? The ones whose outfits inspired such complimentary news posts when they performed at the opening ceremony?

They’re sex slaves.

Lee So-yeon, a North Korean military musician who escaped the country in 2008, explained that, “it might seem like a fancy show on the outside. However, they also have to go to parties and provide sexual services, that sort of pain also follows. They go to the central Politburo party’s events, and have to sleep with the people there, even if they don’t want it.”

At least the women in “The Handmaid's Tale” don’t have to cheer in between rapes.

They’re not alone. One defector describes teenagers being pulled out of school to serve as Kim Jong-un’s sex slaves, remarking, “Officials came to our schools and picked out teenage girls to work at one of his 'hundreds' of homes around Pyongyang. They take the prettiest and ensure they have straight, good legs. They learn to serve him food like caviar and extremely rare delicacies. They are also taught how to massage him and they become sex slaves. Yes, they have to sleep with him and they cannot make a mistake or object because they could very easily simply disappear.”

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One woman who claimed an official raped her when she spoke to him about housing options explained, “In North Korea, a woman’s dream cannot be achieved without being raped or without selling her body.”

That’s true whether her dream is obtaining a home or serving in the military. A female military official who defected describes how a “company commander would stay in his room at the unit after hours and rape the female soldiers under his command. This would happen over and over without an end.”

While rape is illegal in North Korea, it’s so widely accepted that most women are afraid to report it. If, indeed, they know what it is.

A survey of defectors intended to assess the rate of sexual violence in North Korea had to be told what sexual violence was because, the publisher remarked, “They thought it was just normal male behavior.”



"While rape is illegal in North Korea, it’s so widely accepted that most women are afraid to report it. If, indeed, they know what it is."

While the stories regarding rape are horrific, it’s not the only hardship women in North Korea face. Domestic violence is condoned, and one defector claims, “if husbands are violent towards their wives the government doesn’t interfere… In my hometown, I’d say domestic violence occurred on a daily basis in three out of 10 households, and less often in others.”

Some people escape, typically to China and South Korea. It’s estimated that 85 percent of escapees are female which seems to speak to the particular horror of their lives. However, escape carries with it a risk of trafficking. Men posing as helpers often rape or sell those women into sexual slavery.

China also forcibly repatriates defectors, so North Korean women are often afraid to speak with the police. If those women are pregnant when they’re found and brought back to North Korea, a forced abortion is performed upon them. A memo from Christian Solidarity Worldwide to Parliament describes how, “Witnesses spoke of women detained with them who were pregnant being taken away and coming back without their baby, complaining of the heartbreak, pain and abuse of having a forced abortion. One witness described how she personally saw a prisoner giving birth to a baby and the nurses cutting the umbilical cord and then smothering the baby with a wet towel.”

Life in prisons is even worse. One report presented to the War Crimes Committee in Washington D.C. in 2016 describe not just frequent rapes, but one prisoner’s newborn child being fed to the dogs.

"When Trump refers to Kim Jong-un as “very honorable” it should make you deeply uncomfortable."



Despite all of this, when the UN reported North Korea had committed human rights violations, the regime issued a reply declaring that “North Korea is Heaven for women.”

It’s not any kind of heaven we’d be familiar with.

Democratic leaders often have to work with authoritarians to ensure peace around the world. Certainly, we should hope that Trump’s talk with Kim Jong-un decreases the risk of nuclear war. However, when Trump refers to Kim Jong-un as “very honorable” it should make you deeply uncomfortable. Very honorable people don’t keep sex slaves. They don’t have regimes where infants are taken from their mothers and murdered.

When Trump similarly submits films showing himself and Kim Jong-un as similar—well, for the sake of American women, we can only hope not.

Jennifer Wright Jennifer Wright is BAZAAR.com's Political Editor at Large.

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