Most North Korean Refugees Are Women. Here’s Why.
Over 33,000 North Korean refugees have made it safely to South Korea. 70% of them are female.
Why?
Firstly, North Korea is both politically and culturally very patriarchal, so women traditionally have a lower status than men, and are actually less tightly controlled by the North Korean system. Starting from the famine of the 1990s, North Korean women had to exploit their official status as “housewives” to engage in private market activities and become the breadwinners to ensure their family’s survival.
This combination of a new found economic role, relatively more mobility, and increased independence led more North Korean women to seek further economic opportunities in China (sometimes with an intention to stay temporarily and return, and sometimes as a more permanent move).
There was also a perception among North Koreans that women would have a better chance of being able to stay under the radar and work informally in China, for instance in restaurants or textile factories. This has in fact been borne out in reality, and there is another more tragic factor pulling North Korean women into China—a demand for North Korean brides among unmarried Chinese men, and a broader demand for North Korean women in the Chinese sex industry (including brothels and online sex chat rooms). This demand is driven by a lack of marriage-aged women particularly in rural Northeast China, a result of China’s ‘one child policy’ and the migration of young Chinese women to the cities.
Regardless of the reason behind their initial escape into China, a higher proportion of women getting out of the country translates to a female majority making it all the way to South Korea.
Another reason that might be thought to hold North Korean men back is that they are tied up in military service for much of their 20s, which is a prime age for defection. Not only do men have less freedom when they are in the military, but they are also often relocated to the interior of the country away from the border with China, decreasing their chances of escape. However this does not exactly play out in the demographic data for arrivals of North Korean refugees in South Korea, which shows no spike in the female to male ratio of refugees in their 20s, so it is hard to say how big of a factor this is.
Finally, anecdotally, it seems that some North Korean women may be more likely to be motivated to make the journey to South Korea after watching dramas and films that are smuggled into North Korea on USBs and Micro-SD cards. North Korean women have told us that visions of life in South Korea where women have much greater freedom in self expression and fashion, and are granted higher status and respect—especially by the romantic heartthrobs of your typical K-drama—fueled their fantasies of life beyond North Korea’s borders and were a significant factor in their decision to escape.
Among the more than twenty thousand female North Koreans who have made it all the way to safe resettlement in South Korea have emerged some of the most effective advocates for the North Korean people. Several North Korea-born women have written books, and are increasingly giving the issue a human face on South Korean television and to audiences around the world.
These advocates, and hundreds of other North Korean women who have quietly strived to successfully resettle and bring their children and other family members to South Korea, are among the people that we’ve been able to support and work with because of your commitment to stand alongside the North Korean people.
So on International Women’s Day, we salute the North Korean women who have been able to emerge as a force of progress despite being born in the most repressive country in the world, and we salute our sisters and brothers around the world who continue to believe in and support them.
- Sokeel Park, Director of Research & Strategy
Film Review: Under the Sun
Spoiler alert: The North Korean government suffers from a severe transparency deficit.
How do you reveal the reality of a society where government representatives script each scene you're allowed to shoot?
Simple: leave cameras rolling at all times, and show your audience the scripting and retakes of "real life" in all their glory.
You end up not with a documentary about a family going about their lives, but a behind-the-scenes reveal of a family whose dinner-table conversations, workplace interactions, and even expressed emotions are curated by government propagandists for external consumption.
No North Koreans question this process out loud--except to check their lines.In this system everyone knows the role expected of them, especially with government officials overseeing everything. So before our very eyes, we observe the theatrical production of an ideal 'Kimilsungist socialist society', played out by real citizen-actors. And when citizens know the risks of not playing the part they’re asked to play, they become good actors.
This is of course a very real aspect of life in North Korea, even when no cameras are rolling. The everyday ritualised theatrical production of 'obedient citizens willingly striving as one for the socialist cause' is one of the key means by which the state perpetuates itself. Everyone knows what to say, how to say it, and that you have to say it. Whatever your innermost thoughts may be, it's hard to break role publicly when everyone else is sticking so closely to a ‘script’.
Revealing the nature of this production, warts-and-all, is one of the key contributions of Under the Sun.But as with any behind-the-scenes look, cracks in the facade, tired actors and cock-ups are apparent.'Off stage', strategically placed cameras record poor Pyongyang kids scavenging from a trash can. We see commuters disembarking to push a tram. A government 'set manager' shoos away two women approaching the back door of a milk processing plant with a big jug; we can only guess they were looking for an off-the-books top up, unaware there were foreign filmmakers present that day.
We see a forgetful factory worker reporting they have exceeded production targets by 150%, and in the next take 200%. It doesn't matter to any of her coworkers which fiction is used, and no one bats an eyelid.
And of course, children being less practiced in their roles within the system than adults, the best scenes feature North Korean kids. A small girl struggles to keep her eyes open while an aging war veteran wearing far too many medals bumbles through an anti-American propaganda lecture, punctuating tales of shooting down planes with praise for Kim Il-sung.
Jinmi, the star of the film, breaks down in tears when the pressure of performance becomes too much. Elsewhere, on-screen text tells us that she unwittingly revealed her parents' true occupations of journalist and restaurant worker before the government co-producers scripted them as the more socialist-appropriate textile factory technician and soy milk plant worker.
It's hard to not recall The Truman Show, and it boggles the mind to think there are 25 million people living out their lives in this theater state.
But unlike a Hollywood Movie, the enemy here is not represented by a snarling on-screen character. The propagandists are unnamed and we rarely even see their faces properly. The enemy is in fact the system itself, whose quiet tyranny forces every citizen - including the propagandists - to become complicit in its perpetuation by allowing the expression of only a singular narrative of what it is to be a North Korean.
