SEOUL, South Korea — After Seon-mi’s mother escaped North Korea, hoping to find her way to South Korea, she was sold by traffickers to a man in a northeastern Chinese village.

The man was a violent schizophrenic, but the mother was trapped, according to Seon-mi’s South Korean caretakers. She lacked proper papers in China and was vulnerable to forced repatriation to North Korea, where she could face imprisonment, torture or worse. The two had a child, Seon-mi, who is now 11.

More than 32,000 North Koreans have escaped to South Korea since a famine hit their country in the 1990s, and their harrowing journeys are often made worse by having to spend years in limbo in China, according to defectors, human rights researchers and South Korean officials. Some are trapped there for years, forced to work in the sex industry or live with men in the countryside who could not find Chinese wives before the women enlist the help of human rights activists and smugglers to reach South Korea.

When Seon-mi was about 6, her Chinese father murdered his own parents with a knife and then killed himself. But before he did so, he slashed Seon-mi nine times in the chin, neck and shoulder. Despite repeated plastic surgeries in South Korea, which the mother and daughter finally reached, the girl’s scars are still visible.