(For women between the ages of 15 and 29, up to one-fifth have worked in the sex industry at one time or another, according to estimates.) If that estimate is closer to the truth, it would mean that 1 out of every 25 women in the country is selling her body for sex - despite the passage of tough anti-sex-trafficking legislation in recent years. The South Korean government’s Ministry for Gender Equality estimates that about 500,000 women work in the national sex industry, though, according to the Korean Feminist Association, the actual number may exceed 1 million.
Internet chat rooms and cell phones have opened up whole new streams of business for ambitious prostitutes and pimps. Indeed, paid sex is available all over South Korea - in coffee shops, shopping malls, the barber shop, hotels, motels, as well as the so-called juicy bars, frequented by American soldiers, and the red-light districts, which operate openly. Prostitution and the sex trade flourish in South Korea just under the country’s shiny surface.ĭespite its illegality, prostitution and the sex trade is so huge that the government once admitted it accounts for as much as 4 percent of South Korea’s annual gross domestic product - about the size of the fishing and agriculture industries combined.
South Korea, a wealthy, powerful Asian super-state, technology hub and stalwart U.S.
