Modern Day Comfort Women

From time to time here at blog central a reader will pick up on a post and add important details or expand the scope of interest and inquiry presented.

I received such a comment from an anonymous source on a post from January 2012 today.  See: South Korean Protesters Care for 'Comfort Woman' Statue.

The comment stressed the importance of recognizing that the issue of so called Korean "comfort women" is hardly contained in the past.

The comment says in part:

" ... I'd like to raise the current comfort women issue. Actually I don't care about the comfort women issue Japanese army caused. That's the history and over. Also it was just a problem lasting for five years or so though it was during the war time. However, the current comfort women problem has been going on for over half a century. Yes, the comfort women issue is still going on -- they changed the customers from the Japanese army to the USA army, but their business has kept on going."

The following links are provided for further reading:

Modern day comfort women - University of Rhode Island.
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/modern_day_comfort_women.pdf

Also you can visit the page (modern comfort women) to know more, which is https://www.facebook.com/pages/Modern-Comfort-Women/389352384499538

I have downloaded the article from the University of Rhode Island entitled "Modern Day Comfort Women: The US Military, Transnational Crime and the Trafficking of Women" by Donna M. Hughes, Katherine Y. Chon, and Derek P. Ellerman.

The paper is not dated and I cannot at this point say whether it is published anywhere but it makes for an interesting read.  In the past I have not paid mind to the issues and scope of analysis that are raised.  As a result my interest in the issues of memory, confrontation, and comfort women has now benefitted greatly (the past is never just in the past.)

The introduction offers some insight into what is covered in the academic paper:

The U.S. military bases in Republic of Korea (commonly known as South Korea) form an international hub for trafficking of women for prostitution and related forms of sexual exploitation. The trafficking of women is a lucrative moneymaker for transnational organized crime networks, ranking third, behind drugs and arms, in criminal earnings. The traffickers recruit and transport women to meet the demand largely created by U.S. military personnel and civilian men in South Korea and the United States. In some cases, the U.S. servicemen themselves are traffickers working with Asian organized crime networks. 

This paper will examine three types of trafficking that are connected to US military bases in South Korea: Domestic trafficking of Korean women to clubs around the military bases in South Korea, transnational trafficking of women to clubs around military bases in South Korea, and the transnational trafficking of women from South Korea to massage parlors in the United States. Although, the three types of trafficking will be discussed separately, in reality, they sometimes overlap. For example, in one case a Korean woman was the victim of multiple acts of trafficking: She was abducted at age 14 from her village in South Korea, and was repeatedly raped and exploited by soldiers of the South Korean army. An American soldier brought her to the U.S. through a sham marriage, where she was then trafficked within the U.S. on a massage parlor circuit.

I cannot vouch for what the FaceBook links contain as some of you know that I actively do not participate in anything related to FaceBook - to the sometimes great annoyance of DD.

With the revelations coming from Edward Snowden maybe more folks should withdraw their consent and participation from FaceBook - but that is another story for another time.

Anyway, thank you to the anonymous commenter who made the above information available.  I hope to hear more from you.

Onward!