Since the mid-1990s, the dramatic growth in the South Korean economy has largely allowed Korean women to escape the exploitative conditions of the camptown bars and clubs (large numbers remain in higher-end prostitution for Korean customers). Filipinas and, to a lesser extent, women from Russia and former Soviet republics have generally replaced Korean women as the primary camptown sex workers. The South Korean government’s creation of the E-6 “entertainer” visa has allowed Korean “promoters” to import the women on a legal basis. The E-6 visa is the only Korean visa for which an HIV test is mandatory; venereal disease tests are required every three months. Over 90 percent of women with the visas are estimated to work in the sex industry.
The promoters who recruit women often promise to find them work as singers or dancers—applicants must submit videos demonstrating singing ability. The agents then bring the women into South Korea, charging them a fee that the women must pay off by working in camptowns and other bars and clubs.
The women sign a contract in their home country specifying an employer and a salary, but they often end up in different clubs and working for a lower salary than promised. The promoters and owners often charge hidden fees or deduct money from the women’s salaries, keeping them in perpetual debt. Often the housing and food promised in contracts is little more than a decrepit shared room above the bar and ramen noodles. In some clubs, owners force women to perform sex work in “VIP rooms” or other locations. In others, indebtedness and psychological coercion force the women into sex. Speaking little Korean, the women have little recourse. Promoters and bar owners often hold the women’s passports. Leaving their place of employment would subject them to immediate arrest, fines, imprisonment or deportation by the South Korean state and potentially violent retribution from those to whom they are indebted.
In 2002, a Cleveland television station exposed how military police officers were protecting the bars and the GIs in them, and interacting with women they knew had been trafficked and sold at auction. “You know something is wrong when the girls are asking you to buy them bread,” one soldier said. “They can’t leave the clubs. They barely feed them.” Another commented, “There are only Americans in these clubs. If they’re bringing these women over here to work for us, they should get paid a fair wage. They should have the right to a day off.” (Most of the women get one day off a month.) In a 2002 report, the State Department confirmed that South Korea was a destination for trafficked women. And in 2007, three researchers concluded that U.S. bases in South Korea have become “a hub for the transnational trafficking of women from the Asia Pacific and Eurasia to South Korea and the United States.”
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/sex-industry-military-bases-213311#ixzz3qUELPbBq
