Foreign Women Trafficked to United States Military Areas in South Korea: Trafficking Processes and Victim Profiles in a Different Context

Abstract

This paper details the specific circumstances of foreign women sex trafficked to American military base areas (camp towns) in South Korea, focusing particularly on Filipinas. I suggest that the processes and patterns of trafficking to Korea, including the victim profiles and their migration trajectories, differ in several important respects from those put forward under prevailing stereotypes of trafficking victims, which is based largely on selected findings about trafficking in South Asia and the Greater Mekong Sub-Region (GMS). The departures presented by the Korean context point to the need to recognize differences as well as commonalities in the characteristics of sex trafficking throughout the region and the need to draw more fully on a range of trafficking sites beyond the more often discussed South Asia and GMS in extending our understandings of trafficking.