U.S. military intervention in South Korea coincided with the formation of camptowns or kijichons near the bases. Catering to the consumer needs of the American GIs, such camptowns consist of clothing stores, barber shops, and bars or clubs with English names, which the soldiers frequent off duty to drink beer, relax, and pick up women, the center of kijichon life (K. Moon 17). As Katherine Moon notes in her extensive and provocative study, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations, as manifesta-tions of the U.S. military empire as a global and transnational phenomenon, camptowns are “hybrid and ambiguous spaces that blur national boundaries and sovereignty” (19), and kijichon prostitution is thus “a part of the U.S.
military’s chain of overseas camptowns which have thrived on prostitution in Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, Okinawa, and the Philippines, in addition to South Korea)” (15).
As Cynthia Enloe has argued, the ideology and lifestyle of the military establishment depend on highly gendered notions of femininity and mascu-linity, and the connection between military power and male heterosexual power often dictates the soldiers’ relationships to the local community. Enloe asserts that “soldier-clients learn to view their masculinity—and the prowess of the nation they represent—as dependent on their sexual domination of the women who live near the base” (“Feminist Perspective” 101), and thus, the
military base “is a package of presumptions about the male soldier’s needs, the local society’s sexual needs, and about the local society’s resources for satisfying those needs” (Bananas 200). Camptown prostitution is therefore a highly particular kind of exploitative military, political, and sexual rela-tionship, where the militarization of men takes place at the expense of the domination of poor, socially ostracized women, almost all of whom either have sought life in a camptown as a last resort for survival or have been sold into prostitution. Studies have documented that extreme poverty; being homeless, abandoned, or orphaned from the Korean War; abusive relation-ships; and physical beatings or rape from a male family member or from other men in the village were the most common reasons that women entered camptowns in the 1950s to 1970s. Sadly and ironically, societal labels that criminalize rape victims as “fallen,” “ruined,” and “whores” led women to regard camptowns as their only option, yet they continued to feel obligated to their duties as daughters and sisters by supporting aging parents and by providing schooling fees for male siblings. In 1966, among the 22,670 sur-veyed women in prostitution, 76 percent were either without a parent or without a place to stay, and among the 105 surveyed who were working in the Yongsan area in 1965, all were supporting from one to eight members of their family (Sex Allies). The few who were able to voluntarily leave camp-towns as they reached middle age ended up resorting again to sex work, because factory work was the only other option for women without an edu-cation, but even this was available only to young women with agile hands and didn’t provide enough money to support their own children (Sturdevant and Stoltzfus 239).
The lives of camptown prostitutes reveal that their victimization is com-pounded by a number of factors: South Korean national politics, U.S. hege-mony, racism, sexism, patriarchy, poverty, and gender ideologies. The debt-peonage system of the clubs made incurring debts inevitable, since women who first entered a camptown needed to borrow money from the club owner to be supplied with clothes, makeup, bedding, and other neces-sities, and the clubs set impossible quotas for the number of drinks to sell and the number of men a night. Beatings and rape from club managers were common as well.
That prostitution entails multiple forms of violence, abuse, harassment, physical beatings, and emotional injury from pimps and clients has been widely documented. In an essay that powerfully argues against prostitution as a human rights violation that contradicts the UDHR’s claims for the in-alienable rights and dignity of the human person, Kathleen Barry contends that not just the prostitution of children or in cases without consent but all prostitution is a human rights violation: “Objectifying a human being, re-ducing her to a commodity to purchase, is an abusive act of power. It violates a person’s human dignity and obliterates her human rights”. Barry goes on
to state that objectification provides the context for “other seemingly non-violent behaviors that include humiliation, demeaning and degradation.”
Jessica Neuwith notes that prostitution is a violation of human rights be-cause it is never unrelated to human trafficking: the “demand for prostitu-tion fuels sex trafficking to supply it; not all prostituted women are sex trafficking victims, but all sex trafficking victims are sold into prostitution”.
In addition, Neuwith states that while women engaging in “survival sex” out of dire economic needs may “technically be consensual,” prostitution cannot be viewed as an instance of “free will,” since “there is no choice in the ab-sence of the freedom to choose otherwise.” There is a different view on this issue, one that advocates for prostitution as a human right—not as a way to protect pimps, but as a way to better protect sex workers for whom prostitu-tion may be their only way to earn a living from being arrested, persecuted, and criminalized (Murphy).
What both sides seem to agree on, however, is that prostitutes suffer vio-lence and danger on a daily basis. But women in kijichon prostitution are in an especially vulnerable and defenseless position because of the dynamics of U.S. imperialist relations to South Korea that further set the context for the vast power differences of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and language.
While one former prostitute was not afraid to admit that the GI clients treat-ed her better than Korean men, most nottreat-ed that they had to deal with the abusive behavior of clients—racism, insults to the women’s lack of English language skills, and physical violence (Sturdevant and Stoltzfus). Some of the terms that the GIs used to refer to the women—“yellow monkey” and “little brown fucking machine”—were clear reenactments of racist and sexist stereotypes in the United States that determined camptown relations. Addi-tionally, many of the camptown clubs and bars had “Korean citizens forbid-den from entry” signs, which meant that the interaction between U.S.
military personnel and Koreans took the form of American GI male cus-tomer/dominant nation and Korean female hostess/subordinate nation, a form that echoes and encapsulates the reality of U.S. military hegemony.
Kijichon women are stigmatized and ostracized from South Korean so-ciety, especially for their prostitution to Yangnom, a derogatory term for Western men. Yangalbo (Western whore), Yangsaikshi (Western bride), Yanggongju (Western princes), and UN Madam are common epithets in a society that, even today, would view taking one’s own life as more honorable than prostitution for survival. Although camptown women have formed as-sociations and societies among themselves (S. Moon 58), they have had little support from the larger community. Even until the late 1990s, South Korean feminist groups neglected camptown prostitution, with activists admitting that they had never placed kijichon prostitutes in any purview of exploitation or oppression, perceiving the women as “‘too different’ from themselves”
(K. Moon 9).
Camptown prostitution came to public attention in 1992 with the hor-rifying death of Yun Geum Yi (age twenty-eight) by U.S. Second Division Private Kenneth Lee Mackle (age twenty) on October 28 in Dongducheon (“Report on US Crimes in Korea”). At the time that Yun’s body was found in her room, the trunk of an umbrella had been penetrated twenty-seven inch-es into her rectum, and a coke bottle had been half inserted inside her va-gina.6 An autopsy that followed confirmed that two beer bottles had also been inserted inside Yun’s uterus. Broken matches were found inside Yun’s mouth, and her body, covered in severe contusions and bruises, had been sprayed with laundry detergent powder. Fingerprints on the beer bottles found inside Yun’s uterus enabled the police to trace the killer.
Under the SOFA, crimes committed off duty are subject to South Korean court of law.7 However, the clause on “Criminal Jurisdiction” in the SOFA (Article XXII 5 [d]) that states that the authorities of the Republic of Korea
“shall give special consideration to a request from the military authorities of the United States for assistance in maintaining custody of an accused mem-ber of the United States armed forces, the civilian component, or a depend-ent” makes it difficult to say that the Korean court of law has full independence and autonomy of cases involving the U.S. military. At the first trial, Mackle received a life sentence without parole, but he later received a reduced sentence of fifteen years. Although imprisoned in Cheonan prison on May 17, 1994, Mackle returned to the United States in 2006 after being released on parole. Yun’s murder is not exceptional by any case. There have been a number of murders of camptown prostitutes by U.S. military person-nel, women strangled and beaten to death, bodies found with hangers in-serted in the uterus (“Report on US Crimes in Korea”).8
Yet what is truly appalling, as detailed extensively by Katherine Moon, Seungsook Moon, and Ji-Yeon Yuh, is that during the Park Chung Hee regime, the South Korean government promoted camptown prostitution as a way both to keep the American forces in South Korea happy and to bring in foreign currency. In 1961, Park Chung Hee had declared prostitution illegal with the Prostitution Prevention Law, but he revised his stance a year later, designating 104 special districts as exempt from the law, 60 percent in camptowns.9 Far from intervening in the abuse and violence, by encouraging and legitimizing prostitution, the South Korean government, in effect, facilitated the human rights violations of the women. In addition, as part of the camptown cleanup campaign of the 1970s, the women were subjected to intrusive vaginal inspec-tions and mandatory VD exams, which were initially enforced by U.S. author-ities but eventually were actively supported by the South Korean government and medics. Some camptown women felt that having their bodies examined by U.S. medics, or being required by the U.S. military police to show valid VD ID cards, was a violation of their human rights as well as their rights as Korean citizens (K. Moon 131), but they were powerless to escape the practice.
As South Korea became more aware of camptown prostitution with the 1992 death of Yun Geum Yi, in 2004, Seoul Broadcasting Station aired a documentary, Sex Allies: Kijichon Clean-Up Campaign, which featured testi-monies of former prostitutes and government authorities who had been in office during the 1960–1980s. Among the shocking details that emerged from the interviews was again that camptown prostitution was collaboratively promoted by the United States and the South Korean governments. A former U.S. military sergeant noted that gates outside the bases were referred to as
“condom land,” since the guards checked to make sure the men were carry-ing condoms and distributed them freely. One Korean civil official related that the camptown of Kunsan, “America Town,” was a town planned and built specifically to cater to the needs of the GIs. Clubs, bars, and five-hun-dred-room units for prostitution were established, and shuttle service from the base was provided, with one thousand GIs arriving in the camptown on some nights. Moreover, former camptown women reiterated that low-tier government officials would visit them regularly to give classes in etiquette, good conduct, and the English language; applauded the women for being
“civilian diplomats” and “true patriots” for contributing to the South Korean economy by earning U.S. dollars; and said that the women should be proud.
Women who tested positive in the routine biweekly VD checkup were quarantined in detention centers, referred to among the women as “monkey houses” for the bars and high walls and fences. Women were highly fearful of being detained because of the side effects of the penicillin injections, leav-ing some even paralyzed. Severe injuries also resulted from attempts to es-cape the center by jumping from the upper floors or walls. As a former medical worker who had administered the shots confirmed, the penicillin dosage was the amount designated by the U.S. government, which he ac-knowledged may have been too potent for South Korean women.
In 2014, 122 former camptown prostitutes, now aging and poor, sued the South Korean government, demanding compensation of $10,000 each, for encouraging them to work as prostitutes, violating their human rights by forcing them to undergo degrading checkups, and locking them up in quar-antine centers till they were judged fit to go back to work (Park; Evans).
Though the requested compensation may have been minimal, the women sought an apology and admission from the South Korean government of its responsibility for prostitution that served the U.S. military (Cain). In the ninth hearing of July 2016, Park Young Ja, the only one among the 122 women to testify publicly, stated that despite the shame of making her iden-tity public, there was something she had to say (Jin). Opening her statement with “we have been abandoned by a country in which we were born,” Park continued that the South Korean government created kijichon prostitution and profited from the exploitation and abuse of poor young women, many in their midteens who had nowhere to go or were sold into prostitution, who
had to serve five men a night at minimum. Park added that the government furthered the oppression of the women by condoning the violence of the pimps and the club managers.
While some former camptown women choose to refer to themselves as comfort women, the term may not be the most appropriate since they were not forcibly taken to become sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II. However, the South Korean government was responsible for the system in which the women would remain trapped in kijichon until old age, when they would no longer be useful as dollar-earning commodities.
Park Young Ja’s comment that she had been abandoned by her country is a poignant remark that human rights are not a natural right owned by all but a right determined by the state or available only to those who are positively incorporated and positioned to claim them within the nation.
Two and a half years after the women brought their case to court, in January 2017, the Seoul Central District Court came to a ruling: the South Korean government should provide $5,000 each to 57 of the 122 women who initially sued the government in 2014. The court stated that since the legal regulation that stipulates quarantine of carriers of contagious disease, which includes sexually transmittable conditions, was passed on August 19, 1977, it recognizes the South Korean government’s forceful quarantine of women before the law as a violation in legal terms, and as such, only 57 women could be considered for compensation. The court, however, did not accept claims made by the camptown women that the South Korean government actively created camptowns to facilitate prostitution, or the claim that the camptown women had scarce autonomy in entering lives in prostitution or could not leave them freely. The court thus did not order that the South Korean gov-ernment provide any form of additional compensation to the 57 women or to the remaining 63 women (since the case was brought to court in 2014, two women have died) whose histories in quarantine centers could not be con-sidered “illegal” confinement or who had not been placed in such facilities.
According to a statement released by Camptown Women Human Rights League in South Korea (established in 2012) after the January 2017 court ruling, although former camptown prostitutes are “not satisfied with the ruling,” they believe that they have made partial progress insofar as the court ruling is a sign that the Korean government admits to some sense of respon-sibility. At the time of writing, the women have appealed against the January 2017 ruling, and the case is still on trial, being reviewed in the Seoul High Court.
Conclusion
Although without any legal enforceability, the UDHR has served an import-ant function. It has been used as a platform for local, international,
dia-sporic, and nongovernment organizations to promote dignity, respect, and free choice as one’s natural rights as a human being. There have been various movements to intervene in the violence inflicted and condoned by state re-gimes, such as torture, genocide, rape, human trafficking, child labor, social and economic disenfranchisement, extreme poverty, and environmental hazards, and political and civil rights as well as economic and cultural rights that include rights to food, housing, health, and education have become cen-tral to public discourses on human rights.
There is, however, a contradiction between the goals of the UDHR, for human rights to have universal reach and application, and the particularities of the world it seeks to address, which is conflict ridden, divided, and not without but with distinctions of “race, colour, sex, language, religion, polit-ical or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other stat-us” (Article 2 UDHR). But the vague and naive universalist rhetoric of the UDHR can in fact work as a reminder of the daunting challenges ahead in making the doctrine into a reality: to transform the particularities of indi-viduals and states to a universalized status.
The case of South Korea makes evident that multiple intersections—U.S.
extraterritorial sovereignty, racism, South Korean state nationalism and anti-Communism, capitalism and nation building, patriarchy, and gender ideologies—trouble the status of human rights as a privileged and universal discourse. This is not to say that human rights are virtually nonexistent or ineffective in South Korea but to argue for the importance of engaging in the discourse and practice of human rights from the particularities of national-ity, ethnicnational-ity, class, and gender, to name a few, and the ongoing imperative for context-specific analysis as a way to launch further critical conversations with and about other sites.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the organizers of “The 2015 Summer Institute in Asian American Studies: The Subject(s) of Human Rights” (July 16–18, Taipei, Taiwan): Guy Beauregard, Pin-chia Feng, Shyh-jen Fuh, Hsiu-chuan Lee, and Chih-ming Wang. Special thanks to Guy Beauregard, Hsiu-chuan Lee, and Cathy Schlund-Vials for their detailed comments on an early version of this paper, and to Cathy for all the work in bringing this collection into form.
NOTES
1. Chouliaraki, qtd. in Sabsay 280.
2. Fassin, qtd. in Sabsay 280.
3. In the epilogue, a man in a suit urges viewers to buy defense bonds as a way to
“share the responsibility to keep the country strong”: “I have seen the crime of Korea. . . . When we Americans see something we don’t like, something that we believe is wrong, something we consider a crime against mankind, we want to act. We want to put a stop
to what’s wrong. That’s the kind of people we are” (emphasis added). He also urges “all Americans to meet aggression wherever it strikes.” See “Crime of Korea.”
to what’s wrong. That’s the kind of people we are” (emphasis added). He also urges “all Americans to meet aggression wherever it strikes.” See “Crime of Korea.”