Gender Burden and Invisibility

While women world-wide carry a heavy gender burden, mental load, and generalized invisibility, the women of North Korea are fighting a battle that most of the world will never know about, both in their country and in neighboring countries they escape to. Join me for a difficult, yet factual conversation around the first hand experience of a North Korean woman I know, hear about her journey, and get a deeper understanding of what we do at NKFI. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Listen, all names have been changed to protect our participants and their family members who may remain in North Korea.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Gender burden and invisibility. The unseen struggles of North Korean women. Today's podcast will be a little different than our prior episode due to deeply traumatic subject matter and out of an abundance of respect and caution for the women who've shared their stories with me in the past. With this in mind, please be aware that the following information that I'm going to share with you delves into challenging topics centered around disproportionate gender roles, abuse, exploitation, human trafficking, and CPTSD. If you are sensitive to these topics, I recommend that you take a pause and join us for our next episode in order to prevent any undue stress. For those that intend to stay with me through this episode, please proceed with caution, care, and an open mind for what you are about to hear. I love my job with NKFI. I really, really do. However, uh sometimes this job involves talking about things that are uncomfortable, challenging, or are life-altering. And that's not always easy to do, you know. Um, but these things are really important and they play a key role in informing and advocating for the people of North Korea. There are moments in everyone's life where you're presented with stark facts around something that in turn alters your view of the world forever. For most of us, we experience things uh such as women statistically achieve higher levels of post-secondary education, and yet they're paid 85 cents for every $1 that a man earns, and women only hold 25% of all executive roles in the workforce. Or reading scores nationwide show an illiteracy rate of 21% or below a fifth grade level, which contributes to an estimated $2.2 trillion in social services and taxes annually. That just really is unbelievable. But to push that further, you know, in some states, prison beds and prison max capacity is determined by elementary level reading scores. My mind was blown by that. You know, nearly 11% or 35.9 million Americans live below the poverty line, of which an estimated one-third are children. Now, the current poverty line, in case you didn't know, uh, in 2026 is $31,812 annually. Regarding the children that are living in poverty, children at or below this level tend to have lower than average reading skills. So when you think of that compared to the information presented just before, you know, these kids are being thrown into a cycle of illiteracy, poverty, and prison, which is shocking. But America is number one in spending for the military, greater than the next 14 countries combined. Yet we're 36th in educational success. The cost to eliminate hunger globally in one year costs roughly $40 billion. The cost to eliminate hunger through long-term agricultural investment is $330 billion, give or take. With that in mind, the world's top 50 billionaires own more than $5.5 trillion, which would take 15,000 years for them to spend all of it at a million dollars a day. And yet, they could stop global hunger at the drop of a hat with no impact to them. Those are the shocking facts that we're all so used to hearing. You know, and while they're mind-altering, uh, you know, there are entire cross-sections of our global family that are trapped in a silent struggle that the world will never know about unless we, as individuals, step up and say something. For women world over, the fight for safety, security, and equality is all too real. While we are equal in number, studies have shown that women carry a much higher mental and gender burden than our male peers. We work more hours inside and outside the home each work week, balance more in every area of life, are underrepresented in politics and business, and fight daily to have the autonomy and basic rights of men. And as infuriating as this is, our North Korean sisters are struggling under a complex system of barriers, hoops, and patriarchal social systems that hurt and erase them within North Korea and in surrounding countries. While I could spend literal hours talking about the roots of the problems stemming from accepted structures that have just compounded over time, I'm just gonna simply reference the neo-Confucianism influence of the three obediences or threefold dependency, where women are made subservient to patriarchal lineage and expected to remain subordinate and subservient to their fathers, husbands, and eventually their sons. They're expected to put their entire lives into servant mode. This is paired with modern instances of abuse by foreign nations, for example, the Japanese military sexual slavery, aka the comfort women of World War II, and the dictatorial influence of men in high positions of power with the Communist Party of the North. The women of the Korean peninsula, they've spent the entirety of their lives belittled, demeaned, devalued, and erased from public in so many ways. And then there are entirely different levels of abuse, erasure, and disappearing of North Korean women due to the views and treatment of women in neighboring countries, where these women must travel in order to achieve refugee status and officially escape to freedom. Today they're told by their government and the men in their lives who they will be, what they will wear, what they deserve, how they'll behave, how their hair is cut and worn, and what their ultimate role in life is gonna be. This blending of historic neo-Confucianism, communism, patriarchal values, and dictatorship have led women to be undervalued, controlled, exploited, and dying while trying to simply survive. When talking about the modern-day gender burdens of North Korean women, I'm referring specifically to the fact that they are expected to accept jobs assigned to them only to retire from their jobs once married in order to bear children, and then be expected to provide solely within the home and immediately around. The expectation is that they're going to surrender their only remaining autonomy, their whole identity and life to be subservient to their husband, serve the family, and uphold the regime via the birthing of many children. Unfortunately, in recent years, their husbands haven't been getting paid wages or rations for their work, and any rations they bring home have been well below actual need. Recent trade deals with China and Russia have begun to change this. However, those relationships are volatile, and in order to prevent starvation, especially in the very remote areas, between the months of February, which is deep in the winter, and the spring foraging season, the women are expected to pick up the slack. This means that there's an increased burden on women to not only cook, clean, mend, heal, plan and prepare for future needs and bear children, but also now need to find ways to survive by filling in nutritional gaps and supplementing all food shortfalls via foraging, small-scale farming, and working in marketplaces. Further, the women of North Korea are silently bearing the anger, frustration, infidelity, and the abuse of their spouses. You know, and though though they do have the right to divorce, doing so puts them in a position of damaging their reputation within the community and with a state and puts them at deep risk for deeper poverty, starvation, and more. To speak up is to put themselves in danger. To stay and tolerate it puts their lives at risk. To leave their home country is to risk losing everything, including their lives. But the world isn't talking about this. We're being inundated with news of nuclear ambitions, white collar crime, trade agreements with foreign nations, in which global leader has had the quippiest soundbite of the week. Meanwhile, our North Korean sisters continue to be burdened, overrun, ignored, shut up, and killed silently within their homeland and the surrounding areas. In order to survive, they remain quiet and hidden, as they're expected to, both in their homeland and in their neighboring regions. To help illustrate the actual scenario that North Korean women are living in, I'd like to share a true life personal account with you. I've changed the name of the woman to protect her and her family members, her experience, her life testimony, and what happened to her during her escape. Mara's story. North Korean societal structure is dictated to the people via specific set of rules and expectations. Well, men and women are told that they have equal rights. Marriage is a societal standard that is decided not by the individuals, but uh more of a community scenario based on their political status. Not political party like here in the US, but political status, meaning, are you a communist supporter? Are you someone that they're watching? Are you someone who is considered an enemy? People from different parties cannot marry one another. So it's expected that you will marry accordingly, that men will go to work to their assigned roles for food rations, and that women will retire from the workforce and stay home to manage the house and raise the family. However, due to the failure of the food rations system as early as the 1980s and the ever-changing state structure at work, more and more men are working with no pay or rations, and it is now become the responsibility of the women, the wives, the mothers, to bridge the gap and sustain the family any way they can. And yet they're also expected to stay silent, bear marital abuse, have zero autonomy, and carry the bulk of food acquisition. They are required to do the cooking, preserving, laundry, cleaning, budgeting where they can, and care for both children and their elders. That includes the parents of the wife, but also the husband's parents. The weight of this gender burden has, in many cases, led North Korean women to develop chronic illnesses for which there is no cure. For stress in trying to balance their work and life, and in Korean women sneaking into neighboring countries for work just so that they can provide the absolute basic of needs. And this is the case for most North Korean women that I know. In the life story of my friend Mara, she watched her mother work herself to literal death, caring for her family. She and her mom were really, really close. They shared laughter and stories and life lessons. You know, however, when her mother eventually passed away from exhaustion and chronic illness, Mara was thrust into that role of being the provider in the house. She was just 15 years of age, and she had to find ways to come up with food and make ends meet. Eventually, she became a fishmonger in a local marketplace. However, knowing that she needed to stay enrolled in school in order for her to succeed and be able to earn a living and support her family, she worked three days a week and attended school the rest of the week. She worked half the time and went to school half the time, meaning she missed school. And North Korean schools require 60% attendance in order to graduate and be placed in a meaningful job. This nonstop pressure to provide, succeed, and meet the mark really took its toll on Mara, and eventually she fled out of North Korea in her 20s, bringing only the photo of her mother with her. Unfortunately, Mara was caught by human traffickers in a neighboring country. They sold her into marriage to a disabled man who couldn't speak or hear. She didn't know this at the time, but she soon found out that that was who she was married to. The family of the man expected Mara to take on all of the responsibilities of his care, work wherever she could, however she could, and bear children. However, as is the case with North Korean women caught in this same fate, she was horrifically abused, neglected, and she was deeply hated by the family of her husband. And by law, they owed her nothing. They're not responsible for her, and they could have her arrested or repatriated at any time. And if her husband were to have passed away, they could kick her out into the street where she faced arrest and repatriation. The fear and shock that took hold in Mara's life, it was so overwhelming and created such deep levels of despair that she tried to turn herself into the authorities so that she could go back home. Knowing that being repatriated is brutal, but her life was more brutal. That's such a deep thing to really think about. Ultimately, having her pleas for help go unnoticed, Mara chose to try running away from her captors. Unfortunately, she was caught and severely punished. And eventually, the family just grew tired of the whole situation and they sold her in marriage to another man. It was at that time in that relationship where she found herself pregnant and afraid for not just herself, you know, but also the future of her unborn child. She knew the deep loss of losing a parent, and she knew the fear of being alone in a foreign land. She knew that she yearned for freedom for herself and her child. And so Mara made the choice to protect herself and her baby, and she never let another person take from her or force anything on her ever again. As time passed and her child grew older, so did her fear for repatriation for them both. Neither she nor her child were documented immigrants and had no rights to medical care education or protections from legal action. Her child had been born in a remote area. And the place where she was living, these children who were born out in these remote regions are not documented at all. And without documentation, even if your father was native to the country, without that documentation, you're entitled to nothing. So that fear made her desperate for a way to find some freedom. And so she began making her plan for escape and looking for the right opportunity to come up. She dedicated herself to learning the language where she was living and to save a little bit of money for the anticipated journey ahead. And eventually the door opened, but only enough for her alone to get out. She had to leave her child behind with the father while she made her journey to freedom in South Korea, which was a long, complicated journey. Through this journey, Mara became a Christian. She was able to get a job in South Korea and arrange for her child to immigrate to her in South Korea with the permission of the father, who consequently had become unable to provide proper care for this child. She was able to attend school and get a high-level job as a translator and broker. And, you know, she began to realize a dream for her life for the very first time. Most North Koreans don't have a vision of their future because their future is controlled and decided by someone else. But through this experience, Mara began to see a future. Today Mara is thriving and doing well, you know, but she still battles complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Her child has grown and is in university studying and making plans for their future. Now, while Mara's experience is such a common one for North Korean women, her life really could have gone any way. Of the women who manage to escape North Korea, more than 70% end up in human trafficking scenarios with very little hope of escape. If they don't end up being sold into the sex industry, they're sold into forced marriages. When the buyers get tired of them, they repatriate them, or they sell them to someone else. If they're repatriated, these women are separated from the children that they've born in this nation or that came with them. And it means handing them back to the North Korean government, where they face harsh imprisonment, torture, and sometimes death via execution. And sometimes remaining family members also are punished. The deep heartbreak and trauma caused, especially for the children, is not easily repaired or reconciled. If the families cannot or do not wish to provide care for their undocumented children born by these women, they just abandon them. These children are left completely alone. Innocent and undocumented children are really vulnerable, unable to get an education or medical care, as I'd said. And it's it just perpetuates the cycle of illiteracy and poverty. You know, it puts these kids at high risk for premature death from starvation, illness, and injury. And the mothers know this. You know, the North Korean women know that this is a possibility, and it's just traumatizing and it terrifies them. The guilt, loss, and sorrow felt by the mothers when they find out that their child has gone to prison or has died, the pain and loss, it's really beyond description. Between the threats of assaults and the pressures of providing for their families in North Korea, and the trauma of human trafficking, scenarios of forced labor and sexual slavery, and the constant threats and physical violence, along with cultural and societal expectations to comply or face the punishment, the women of North Korea have been set in a terrible place of suffering and vulnerability at every turn. And the only way to stop it is to shine a light on the facts, speak for the voiceless, provide care, pray for the women of North Korea, and push for radical change at a global level. Knowing Mara and several other North Korean sisters who have shared their experiences has really been life-altering for me. These women are an inspiration around perseverance, and they're worthy of fighting for. So, with all of this heaviness in mind, there's just a lot to think about. And Mara isn't the only person who's ever suffered from this. There are women in the hundreds of thousands who've gone through experiences exactly like this, or very similar to this. Some are still suffering in their homeland, and some are still married to the husbands that they were sold to. And it works out sometimes, but they are suffering with in abject poverty. They're struggling with preventable medical issues and illnesses, dealing with not having access to clean water and education and the news and the list just goes on and on. And it's just really, really heavy. And I really uh encourage you to read more on the issue and think about this, uh, what's going on, and and determine how you can get involved. Um, you know, but I do want to shed a positive light on the situation here, in that New Korea Foundation International runs a uh shalom house network in neighboring countries. Uh this network uh functions as a safe house where these women can go. They can head to the shalom house to receive rest and meals and make connections and be connected with someone who can get them to the next step of their journey to freedom in South Korea. But primarily, the Shalom House Network functions as a place where the women can come to receive mental health care for up to two years, have access to uh medical care, both traditional and modern medical care, that is, and receive treatment, access to medications, vaccinations, everything they Need to get their health back on track. It also provides a place where the women can come to do laundry with modern laundry facilities. They can take a shower privately without being washed or be under the fear of being attacked or assaulted by somebody, which does happen in their homes. And it provides, you know, nutritious meals and a place where the women can build a community and connect with other people who are praying for them and to learn about the goodness of God through our dedicated staff, you know, without it being an overbearing, you must accept Christ to be served. That is not how the shalom house works. They learn about God from a perspective of encouragement and understanding that they are beautiful creations, created perfectly. And it's really such a vital tool. I'm going to tell you, it is not cheap or free to run this center. Um, it's not cheap or free for our staff to go to remote areas and do checkups on people. So I do want to encourage you to also learn about the work that we do here at New Korea Foundation International, uh, specifically the Shalom House project, and ask yourself how you can get involved, how can you support this? How can you commit? What are the gifts and tools you have to help change the lives of these North Korean women who have been so deeply impacted and injured, not only by their country, but by their neighbors. How can we lift them up and heal them, restore them, give them rest, give them hope, and really turn into the amazing individuals they were meant to be. You can visit our website, newcoreafi.org. That's newkoreaf as in franki.org to learn more about what we do, as well as to find uh donate button if donation is in your real house. We want to invite you to do that. You can also send us uh messages, ask questions about what we do and how you might be able to contribute to the overall success and stability of the Shalom House Network. I also want to encourage you to take part in our new Korea Hope broadcast stationed in East Asia. Through this broadcast, you, the listener, can share messages of hope, encouragement, and more with not just the North Korean women inside the country, but also those in neighboring areas throughout East Asia. All you have to do is send your message of hope to NKHB316 at gmail.com. That's N as in Nancy, K as in Kangaroo, H as in Henry, B as in boy316 at gmail.com. And our dedicated staff will read these letters on air so that they can be broadcast deep into North Korea and again the surrounding areas. Lastly, if you enjoyed this second podcast of Voices from the Hidden Kingdom, make sure that you click like and you subscribe and share it with your friends. Because again, the only way that we can shed a light on this silent, horrific situation is to shine a light and speak up on behalf of the Hidden Kingdom. Until next time, an American and Voices from the Hidden Kingdom was brought to you by New Korea Foundation International, a US based 501c3, advocating for North Korean refugees, their nation, and their families.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

Thank you for listening.