*Trigger warning: sexual abuse*

The New Yorker recently conducted an investigation documenting North Korean workers held in Chinese compounds. These workers were watched by security agents 24/7 and forced to work grueling 16-hour shifts under threat of violence. The women interviewed said they also experienced sexual abuse and, in some cases, sex trafficking to maintain income quotas set by North Korea.

Run-aways killed without a trace

According to the U.S. State Department, there are currently over 100,000 North Koreans working in China under forced labor at construction companies, textile factories, software firms, and seafood processing plants. In Dandong, the town at the border between China and North Korea, there are numerous seafood processing plants ringed with barbed wire that look more like prison camps than factories. Workers in these factories told undercover investigators that they were kept there against their will and threatened with violent punishment if they tried to escape. One worker who had been working at a Chinese factory for more than four years said managers told the workers repeatedly that if they ran away, they would be killed “without a trace”.

Remco Breuker, a North Korea specialist from Leiden University in the Netherlands said:

“Hundreds of thousands of North Korean workers have for decades slaved away in China and elsewhere, enriching their leader and his party while facing unconscionable abuse.”

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