Police bust North Korean defector webcam sex trafficking ring

For North Koreans, the promise of defection can be a lifeline - an escape from the notoriously authoritarian and reclusive hermit state. Organised gangs specialise in smuggling those desperate to leave across the border. But for some defectors, getting out of North Korea doesn't spell the end of their problems.

On Monday, South Korea indicted the administrators of Broadcasting Jockey, a webcam broadcasting service in the country. Why? Because, according to a report in NK News, it was being used to stream sex acts, performed by North Korean women forced into online pornography by defection brokers.

Gangs would smuggle women across the border, nominally to freedom in South Korea or China - whereupon the gangs would liaise with the website's operators and force the women "to perform sex acts in front of webcams under threat of deportation back to the North," the report says.

The operators then profited from the sex slavery because users would pay to watch the webcam feeds - with one site netting around $3 million over 3 years from around 10,000 users. The operators' indictment is reportedly on charges of "circulating pornography."

Human rights activist Lee Young-hwan told NK News: "[Human trafficking] is in most cases an organised crime and very hard to be addressed from the civilian side since gangs of thugs are behind these cases... Judicial cooperation between China and Korea is needed to resolve the issue but the rehabilitation of victims should be the focus of the cooperation... If authorities take the wrong approach, even victims could be treated like criminals."

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