SEOUL: In a first, dozens of South Korean women who worked as prostitutes have filed a suit accusing the US military of illegally promoting the sex trade for decades and locking them up to forcibly treat them for sexually transmitted diseases.In the lawsuit, announced in a news conference Monday, the women demanded that the US military apologise and pay damages for playing a hand in managing a vast network of prostitution around its bases in South Korea. Korean women who worked in bars and brothels frequented by US troops have reported rampant human rights violations.In 2022, the women won a court ruling against their own govt. South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered govt to compensate dozens of women for the trauma they endured as “comfort women for the US military,” as they were once known. The court found govt guilty of encouraging prostitution for American GIs to help bring in badly needed US dollars for the economy and maintain ties with the US, on which it relied for security. It also said govt forced many women to get treated for sexually transmitted diseases in a “systematic and violent” way.The latest lawsuit, which was filed at a Seoul court on Friday, was the first attempt by the women to hold the US military accountable. The women and their lawyers said the US military was “the real culprit” in what was a state-sponsored sex trade, even allowing comfort women inside its bases and near its field training grounds.On Monday, a 66-year-old woman said she was 16 when she was sold to a pimp. She said the US military was aware that minors were brought into the trade through sex trafficking but did nothing to stop it.In South Korea, women like her have not won the kind of public sympathy extended to women forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Instead, they said they have had to live in shame for decades. Korean society despised them, they said, treating them like a shameful underside of its alliance with the US that it wanted to obscure. They could not even sue the US military directly; lawsuits seeking compensation from the US troops based in South Korea must be settled with the local govt. So the women sued govt again.Their goal is to find the US military culpable in law. The US has stationed troops in South Korea since the 1950-53 Korean War. Some of the women working in camp towns had been abducted and sold to pimps, while others were lured with the promise of work. All the women were held in debt bondage to pimps, according to scholars who studied the issue. NYT
