Bang Mi Sun left North Korea and crossed illegally into China in 2002. Countless other North Korean women have done the same since the mid 1990s. Hunger and severe shortages of necessities such as medicine and heating fuel have driven them from home.
She says after she and her two children crossed the Tumen River, a Chinese family welcomed them. The son said Bang should earn money to feed her children. She says she thought he was offering her a job.
But instead of a job, the Chinese family arranged for human traffickers to separate Bang from her children and sell her into marriage to a Chinese farmer.
She says her Chinese husband was 15 years older, and had a crippled leg. From that point on, she says, she was his slave. If she did not obey his orders, he beat her, and often locked her in a storage shed for the full day.
Eventually, she made it to South Korea, but human rights activists say Bang's story is typical of tens of thousands of other North Korean women who flee poverty and repression at home....Lee says most of the men who buy the women are either physically or mentally disabled, and incapable of earning a living.
"The rural family or rural husband actually falls into debt because they had to pay a lot of money to buy this woman. So they are again in the poverty trap, which they really wanted to get out of with North Korea," noted Lee.
Some of the women flee - but most of them, says Lee, make do with their new lives - knowing at least that they will not starve.
"But the thing is, these women are young - in their 20's, 30's - and they become pregnant pretty soon. And they kind of give up the idea of running away. Things change - and they try to accept their fate," said Lee.
There are, by some estimates, as many as 50,000 North Korean women in China. Those women are believed to have had up to 20,000 children.
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