Thomas Maresca

Special to USA TODAY

SEOUL — While North Korea remains one of the most repressive societies in the world, life for women there is especially harsh, according to a report released on Thursday by New York-based Human Rights Watch.

North Korean authorities routinely commit sexual violence against women with impunity, according to the report, which was based on interviews with 54 North Koreans who fled the country and eight former officials.

"Unwanted sexual contact and violence is so common that it has come to be accepted as part of everyday life,” the 86-page report says.

Women interviewed for the report described patterns of sexual abuse and discrimination in virtually every social setting in which they encounter government officials and security forces, from detention centers to checkpoints to the marketplaces that have sprung up around the country.

Almost all are afraid to report the abuses for fear of public humiliation and retribution.

“It is unimaginable how anybody would go to the police generally, even more so to file (a case of rape),” said Kim Sun Young, a female farmer in her fifties who is quoted in the report.

She said her only option was to try to remain beneath the notice of authorities: “Whenever I saw ‘law people’ (authorities), my heart would start bumping fast, my legs would tremble, and I’d try not to move, keep still, and look down hoping to pass unnoticed.”

The report comes as Pyongyang is engaged in a wave of diplomacy with the United States and South Korea, with negotiations for a peace treaty and denuclearization at the center of talks.

However, both Washington and Seoul have conspicuously avoided raising the issue of human rights with Kim Jong Un, who has presented a smiling, friendly face to the world during his meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and President Donald Trump.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that President Moon – who is a former human rights lawyer – should know better than to sideline the issue.

“I think (Moon’s) rationalization is: first we’ll deal with denuclearization, then we’ll have economic development, and over time human rights will get better,” Roth said.

“This is Moon just capitulating to Kim Jong Un and proceeding on his terms,” he said. “It's political cowardice. It’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time, to address the nuclear program and address the human rights problem simultaneously.”

Roth added that a lack of human rights will ultimately hamper the peace process in a number of ways, such as stifling economic investment in North Korea. “No company that cares about its reputation would dare build a plant in North Korea until you establish minimum labor rights standards,” he said.

Despite progress in bringing peace to the Korean peninsula, conditions inside North Korea don’t appear to be improving.

At a news conference in New York last week, Tomás Ojea Quintana, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said that Pyongyang continues to commit crimes against humanity, including murder, enslavement, torture, rape and forced abortions.

Yoon Mi Hwa, a former trader in her 30s from North Hamgyong province who was imprisoned in 2009 after trying to flee North Korea, described the conditions in prison to Human Rights Watch. “Every night some woman would be forced to leave with a guard and be raped,” she said.

“Click, click, click was the most horrible sound I ever heard,” she said. “It was the sound of the key of the cell of our prison room opening. Every night a prison guard would open the cell. I stood still quietly, acting like I didn’t notice, hoping it wouldn’t be me the one to have to follow the guard, hoping it wouldn’t be him.”

Amnesty International claims that North Korea holds up to 120,000 political prisoners in camps.

Lee So Yeon, a female North Korean soldier who escaped to the South, said on Thursday that many women in North Korea don’t really understand the concept of sexual abuse.

“These women don’t even realize they were victims of sexual assault,” said Lee, who is the director of the New Korea Women’s Union, a group that helps North Korean defectors. “It was only when I got to South Korea that I finally realized that women could have rights.”

Some 70 percent of the refugees from the North to South Korea are women, many of whom cross the border into China, where sex trafficking and forced marriages are widespread.

"North Korean women would probably say 'Me Too' if they thought there was any way to obtain justice,” said Roth. “but their voices are silenced in Kim Jong Un's dictatorship.”