Comfort Women in Dongducheon
The history of prostitution has existed in every country and society since the birth of humankind.
Prostitution has its system. There are two types of prostitution: public prostitution and private prostitution.
Public prostitution is a system in which the state sets up specific areas to prevent prostitution from negatively impacting the family's power and providing prostitutes with regular checkups and hygiene control.
In November 1947, the U.S. military government issued an order to abolish the public prostitution system in Korea, which had been in operation for more than 30 years.
Prostitution was to be left to the private prostitution system under the free market system.
The so-called 'Korean Military Comfort Women' (prostitutes for Westerners) thrived in the private brothels around the American military garrisons.
Some say there were more than one million of them.
In the case of the Japanese military, the state took care of the soldiers' health and the comfort women from 1937 to August 1945, and it strictly supervised even the fees. Still, the U.S. military left prostitution to the Western prostitute system after entering Korea in September 1945.
Due to Korea's sexual demand, the Park Chung-hee administration introduced the public prostitution system in 1961 to provide hygiene and security services to prostitutes. Still, the Luh Moo-hyun administration abolished it without taking any action.
By the way, on February 8, 2018, there was strange news.
The Dongducheon Western-style women had filed a lawsuit against the government for damages, and the judge of the Seoul High Court hearing the case had newly defined them as "comfort women of Dongducheon.
Judge Yee Beom-gyun, the chief judge of the Court's Civil Division in the 22nd Department, ruled that the regime from the 1960s to the 1980s operated the base village to strengthen the military alliance with the U.S. military and earn foreign currency, and even trained the women to become prostitution brokers.
According to media reports,
According to reports, 117 women who worked as prostitutes at the U.S. military base sought damages from the government. The judge ordered them to pay 7 million won (for those with sexually transmitted diseases), or 3 million won each.
The judge's ruling makes the Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee, and Jeon Doo-hwan administrations look as if they were prostitution-trafficking regimes and makes the U.S.-Korea alliance look like a prostitution alliance and the Korean economy like a prostitution economy.
How many women were involved in sex trafficking in the U.S. military base villages over the past 30-odd years?
As mentioned above, some estimates put the number at one million.
Only 117 of these women have filed lawsuits against the state.
If the nation played the role of a pimp, how much would the nation pocket from the charge for services earned by the prostitutes?
The women reportedly shouted with joy at the verdict, but what was it that made them happy?
Was it the amount of reparations, the honor, or the fact that it branded the governments of Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee, and Jeon Doo-hwan as pimps, defining the U.S.-Korea alliance as a prostitution alliance and the Korean economy as a prostitution economy?
If it was the latter case, I feel that it was not the intention of the "comfort women of Dongducheon" to file the lawsuit.
