Human trafficking is a unique category of evil. Deploying multifarious stratagems -- while typically preying upon the young, neediest and most disenfranchised within society -- abhorrent people-peddlers lie in wait, methodically orchestrating the enslavement of human beings. Their victims bear the image of God -- who intended for all to be free.

While I remain a committed opponent of the death penalty -- the New Testament categorically prohibits it -- an atrocity, widely reported within Korea currently has shaken that conviction.

The perpetrator, surnamed Lee, was apprehended for slaying a 14-year-old girl after exploiting the child for some unutterably heinous misdeed. The lecherous 35-year-old was a pimp, pornographer and sex trafficker with a penchant for child victims. Lee also inflicted extreme cruelties against his now-deceased wife, forcing her into prostitution and videotaping the rapes, which he then sold -- abusing ignominious websites that must be permanently eliminated. The trauma drove the woman to suicide.

The man led a lavish lifestyle with ill-gotten donations -- amounting to $1.15 million -- through which he procured several foreign cars, according to local reports.

Bereaved of her mother, Lee’s 14-year-old daughter -- whose friend was the murder victim -- was doubtlessly diabolically manipulated and pressed by him to entrap his teenage victim.

To cite “intellectual disability” in Lee’s defense is wrong, wholly misplaced and pathetic. Lee was intelligent enough to swindle inordinate amounts of money from an unsuspecting public, to efficiently run trafficking rings enslaving human lives and shrewdly utilize social media toward these ends, all while living a life of luxury.

Lee must be punished most severely. In doing so, South Korea must communicate an unambiguous anti-trafficking stance and ultimatum to traffickers across the nation (and world): Discontinue these outrages or perish.

He hunted teenagers with vomit-inducing “ads” aimed at ensnaring “14-20 year-olds” into toiling at his unlawful “massage parlor” -- which allegedly peddled in child prostitution. There are reported to be others like him still at-large -- they need to be apprehended.

President Moon, please, in the name of humanity, order no-nonsense raids of such “massage parlors” in Korea, many of which reportedly are thinly masked brothels facilitating such crimes. For the love of humanity, please eradicate sex trafficking and child prostitution from this land and the Korean people -- both North and South -- forevermore.

Thousands of North Korean refugees in China have also been sex trafficked and are suffering unbearable violations. Please assist and intercede for them. “Now is the time to face up to the pain people had to endure, which was caused by the nation’s failure to protect its people,” as was stated in your Aug. 15 address.

The UN Commission of Inquiry into North Korea’s human rights situation concluded “a large percentage of women and girls who cross the border from the DPRK (North Korea) to China unaccompanied become victims of trafficking ... for purposes of exploitation in forced marriage and forced concubinage. A number of women and girls are also forced to work in prostitution.”

The Commission ascertained that “traffickers systematically target DPRK women, who are usually hungry and desperate.”

“China’s refoulement practice and the DPRK’s torture and punishment of repatriated persons effectively render victims without protection,” their 2014 investigative report determined.

Some 30,000 children have been born to these trafficked refugees -- routinely involving savage rapes -- and “because registering their birth would expose the mother’s status,” and owing to the ever-present menace of refoulement in China, these Korean children are “effectively rendered stateless.”

Consequently, such innocent victims likewise are prone to sadistic people traffickers.

Securing a unified homeland where repatriated refugees and their children would never be tortured, providing for these Koreans and their young ones a safe haven where they could rebuild their lives without worrying about being trafficked, raped or otherwise assaulted -- what, may I ask, could be more needful? What could be more congruous with the codes of conscience and principled vision for Korea our laudable independence activists espoused?

As esteemed independence leader Ahn Chang-ho expounded, “moral self-training equals independence” and the “only means of making our nation sound is to cultivate in ourselves a sound personality.” Dosan underscored the necessity for “moral education” -- as cleverness devoid of goodness results in destruction.

In 2014, international religious leaders proclaimed -- calling for the elimination of human trafficking by 2020 -- this endemic and pernicious vortex of inhumanity signifies “modern-day slavery.”

According to multiple reports, Koreans -- of both the North and South -- somehow remain among the most trafficked groups in the world.

I agree, the “pain from forced mobilization during the Japanese colonial rule still persists,” as was outlined in your aforementioned speech.

It is unfortunate that many today flippantly dismiss rather than reflect upon this ugly reality: Certain collaborators with fascist Japan were involved in the trafficking of women, in addition to violently persecuting Korea’s independence activists -- who loved Korea more than their lives, and frequently paid the ultimate price on behalf of the nation’s liberty.

Indeed, exemplary freedom-fighters, on the wings of 1919’s March 1st Movement -- that sublime watershed, appropriately credited as the true genesis of the Korean nation -- resolved to eradicate prostitution and its concomitant human rights violations, as evidenced by 1919’s Provisional Government Constitution.

To remove all damaging spiritual and psychological vestiges of Japanese colonial rule from Korean society and effectually heal associated national traumas, we must squarely punish and expunge misogynist, predacious and imbecilic malevolence toward women. Such idiocy shamefully and plainly evokes the contaminated, debased and contemptible mindsets of that rightfully denounced era, and spiritually perpetuates colonialism’s abhorred legacy together with its repugnant and nefarious ill-influence.

Thank you for your reported intensified efforts to stamp out sex crimes in Korea. Please effectively punish all trafficking rings and disassemble the machinery (websites, cameras, poorly enforced laws, etc.) enabling them. Please comprehensively terminate the “modern-day” enslavement of all Koreans.


By Robert Park

Robert Park is a founding member of the nonpartisan Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea, minister, musician and former prisoner of conscience. -- Ed.