Inside the disturbing sex industry thriving around America’s bases.
By
At night in the Songtan camptown outside Osan Air Base in South Korea, I wandered through streets that were getting louder and more crowded now that the sun had set. As the night progressed, hip-hop boomed out of bars along the main pedestrian mall and from second-floor clubs with neon-lit names like Club Woody’s, Pleasure World, Whisky a-Go-Go and the Hook Up Club. Many of the bars have stages with stripper poles for women to dance to the flash of stage lights and blasting music. In other bars, groups of mostly Filipina women in tight skirts and dresses talked to one another, leaning over the table as they shot pool. Some were chatting with a handful of GIs, young and old. Groups of younger GIs walked together through the red-light-district-meets-pedestrian-mall scene, peering into bars and considering their options. Bright signs for cheap hotels beckoned. Near a small food cart, a sign read, “man only massage prince hotel.”
For anyone in the U.S. military, it would have been a familiar sight. As long as armies have been fighting each other, and long before women were widely seen on the battlefield, female labor has been essential to the everyday operation of most militaries. But women haven’t just washed the laundry, cooked the food and nursed injured troops back to health. Women’s sex work has long been used to help keep male troops happy — or at least happy enough to keep working for the military. Today, commercial sex zones thrive in tandem with many U.S. bases around the world, from Baumholder in Germany to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Many look much the same, filled with liquor stores, fast-food outlets, tattoo parlors, bars and clubs, and prostitution in one form or another.
The problems associated with the sex trade are particularly pronounced in South Korea, where “camptowns” that surround U.S. bases have become deeply entrenched in the country’s economy, politics and culture. Dating to the 1945 U.S. occupation of Korea, when GIs casually bought sex with as little as a cigarette, these camptowns have been at the center of an exploitative and profoundly disturbing sex industry—one that both displays and reinforces the military’s attitudes about men, women, power and dominance. In recent years, exposés and other investigations have shown just how openly prostitution has operated around American bases, leading the U.S. government to ban solicitation in the military and the South Korean government to crack down on the industry. But prostitution has far from disappeared. It has only grown more secretive and creative in its subterfuge. If you want to know more about what’s at the root of the military’s struggles with sexual abuse, look no further than Songtan.
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As World War II came to a close, U.S. military leaders in Korea, just like their counterparts in Germany, worried about the interactions between American troops and local women. “Americans act as though Koreans were a conquered nation rather than a liberated people,” wrote the office of the commanding general. The policy became “hands off Korean women”— but this did not include women in brothels, dance halls and those working the streets. Instead, with venereal disease and other communicable infections widespread, the U.S. military government created a VD Control Section that instituted regular inspections and treatment for “entertaining girls.” This category included licensed prostitutes, dancers, “bar girls” and waitresses. Between May 1947 and July 1948, medical personnel examined almost 15,000 women.
U.S. military authorities occupying Korea after the war took over some of the “comfort stations” that had been central to the Japanese war machine since the 19th century. During its conquest of territory across East Asia, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women from Korea, China, Okinawa and rural Japan, and other parts of Asia into sexual slavery, providing soldiers with “royal gifts” from the emperor. With the assistance of Korean officials, U.S. authorities continued the system absent formal slavery, but under conditions of exceedingly limited choice for the women involved.
The arrangements were further formalized after the 1950 outbreak of the Korean War. “The municipal authorities have already issued the approval for establishing UN comfort stations in return for the Allied Forces’ toil,” wrote the Pusan Daily. “In a few days, five stations will be set up in the downtown areas of new and old Masan. The authorities are asking citizens to give much cooperation in coming days.”
After the signing of the 1953 Korea-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty (still the legal foundation for U.S. troops’ access to U.S. and Korean bases), camptowns boomed. In the 1950s alone, 18 new camptowns were created. As the political scientist and camptown expert Katherine Moon explains, they were “virtually colonized space where Korean sovereignty was suspended and replaced by the U.S. military authorities.” The livelihoods of Koreans in the camptowns were almost completely dependent on GIs’ buying power, and sex work was a core part of the camptown economy. The camptowns became “deeply stigmatized twilight zones” known for sex, crime and violence. By 1958, there were an estimated 300,000 sex workers in a country with an entire population of just 22 million. More than half worked in camptowns. In the middle of downtown Seoul, where the Army occupied the 640-acre Yongsan Garrison originally built by Japanese colonizers, the Itaewon neighborhood filled with bars and brothels. GIs named it “Hooker Hill.”
“Cohabitating marriage,” resembling European-style colonial concubinage, also became popular. “Many men have their steadies,” commented one military chaplain. “Some of them own their girls, complete with hooch [small house] and furniture. Before leaving Korea, they sell the package to a man who is just coming in.”
After a military junta seized power in South Korea in a 1961 coup, Korean officials created legally recognized “special districts” for businesses catering to U.S. troops and off-limits to Koreans. American military police could arrest sex workers without health inspection cards, and U.S. doctors treated women with sexually transmitted diseases at detention centers given names such as “the monkey house.” In 1965, 85 percent of GIs surveyed reported having “been with” or “been out with” a prostitute.
Camptowns and prostitution thus became critical parts of a South Korean economy struggling to emerge from the devastation of war. South Korean government documents show male officials strategizing to encourage GIs to spend their money on women in Korea rather than Japan during leave time. Officials offered classes in basic English and etiquette to encourage women to sell themselves more effectively and earn more money. “They urged us to sell as much as possible to the GI’s, praising us as ‘dollar-earning patriots,’” recounts former sex worker Aeran Kim. “Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military.”
A South Korean prostitute leaves her shop in Seoul. Getty
“The women were readily available,” a U.S. official at the Embassy in Seoul told me, describing the time when he’d been stationed in Korea in the early 1980s. “There was kind of a joke” where guys “would take out a $20 bill and lick it and stick it to their forehead.” They said that’s all it took to get a girl.
Today, many of the women who once worked in the system still live in the camptowns, so strong is the stigma attached to them. One of the sex workers, who would identify herself to a reporter only as “Jeon,” moved to a camptown in 1956 as an 18-year-old war orphan. Within a few years, she became pregnant, but she gave up her son for adoption in the United States, where she hoped he would have a better life. In 2008, now a U.S. soldier, he returned to find her. Jeon was surviving on public assistance and selling things from the trash. She refused his help and said he should forget about her. “I failed as a mother,” Jeon says. “I have no right to depend on him now.”
“Women like me were the biggest sacrifice for my country’s alliance with the Americans,” she says. “Looking back, I think my body was not mine, but the government’s and the U.S. military’s.”
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Since the mid-1990s, the dramatic growth in the South Korean economy has largely allowed Korean women to escape the exploitative conditions of the camptown bars and clubs (large numbers remain in higher-end prostitution for Korean customers). Filipinas and, to a lesser extent, women from Russia and former Soviet republics have generally replaced Korean women as the primary camptown sex workers. The South Korean government’s creation of the E-6 “entertainer” visa has allowed Korean “promoters” to import the women on a legal basis. The E-6 visa is the only Korean visa for which an HIV test is mandatory; venereal disease tests are required every three months. Over 90 percent of women with the visas are estimated to work in the sex industry.
The promoters who recruit women often promise to find them work as singers or dancers — applicants must submit videos demonstrating singing ability. The agents then bring the women into South Korea, charging them a fee that the women must pay off by working in camptowns and other bars and clubs.
The women sign a contract in their home country specifying an employer and a salary, but they often end up in different clubs and working for a lower salary than promised. The promoters and owners often charge hidden fees or deduct money from the women’s salaries, keeping them in perpetual debt. Often the housing and food promised in contracts is little more than a decrepit shared room above the bar and ramen noodles. In some clubs, owners force women to perform sex work in “VIP rooms” or other locations. In others, indebtedness and psychological coercion force the women into sex. Speaking little Korean, the women have little recourse. Promoters and bar owners often hold the women’s passports. Leaving their place of employment would subject them to immediate arrest, fines, imprisonment or deportation by the South Korean state and potentially violent retribution from those to whom they are indebted.
In 2002, a Cleveland television station exposed how military police officers were protecting the bars and the GIs in them, and interacting with women they knew had been trafficked and sold at auction. “You know something is wrong when the girls are asking you to buy them bread,” one soldier said. “They can’t leave the clubs. They barely feed them.” Another commented, “There are only Americans in these clubs. If they’re bringing these women over here to work for us, they should get paid a fair wage. They should have the right to a day off.” (Most of the women get one day off a month.) In a 2002 report, the State Department confirmed that South Korea was a destination for trafficked women. And in 2007, three researchers concluded that U.S. bases in South Korea have become “a hub for the transnational trafficking of women from the Asia Pacific and Eurasia to South Korea and the United States.”
In the wake of these revelations, there has been growing public criticism of prostitution around U.S. bases in South Korea. Feminists, religious groups and members of Congress demanded change. The South Korean government began a crackdown, and the Pentagon quickly announced a “zero tolerance” policy for trafficking. In 2004, the South Korean government outlawed prostitution, and the following year President George W. Bush signed an executive order making prostitution illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The military began more strictly monitoring bars and clubs in the camptowns and placing those believed to be involved in trafficking on “off-limits” lists for military personnel.
Some 3,000 South Korean prostitutes wearing caps and face masks to hide their identities, chant slogans during a demonstration on October 19 2004, in Seoul, South Korea. Getty
At least one vet told me, though, that lists like these give troops at bases ideas about where to go rather than where not to go. And instead of shutting down prostitution, bars and clubs have simply responded with new tactics to vaguely disguise the nature of their business. At so-called juicy bars, for instance, men buy small glasses of supposedly alcoholic juice for scantily clad “juicy girls,” most of whom have been trafficked from the Philippines or the former Soviet Union. The rules differ slightly from bar to bar, but basically, if a man buys enough juice, he can arrange to take a woman out. There’s no explicit exchange of money for sex at the bar, but once the two are off the premises, a deal is done.
Just outside Camp Stanley and the Uijeongbu camptown, a former mamasan, Mrs. Kim, told me how the new system works. If you’re a man, “you’ve got to buy her a drinky,” she said. They cost $20 to $40 each, or even $100 at some clubs. “One drinky, twenty minutes,” she continued. The mamasan will tell you to buy more when your time’s up.
If the man buys enough, Kim said—usually at least $150 in juicys—he can ask, “Tomorrow can I take you lunchy?” He also pays the mamasan a “bar fine” to let the woman miss the next day of work, offsetting what she would make selling juicys. Sometimes, a man will pay a bar fine to leave immediately — often for a hotel. In either case, the man and the woman usually negotiate a separate price for sex.
“It’s her choice,” said Mrs. Kim. But if she says no, the man “is crying,” and “he doesn’t come to [the] club. … They don’t come no more.” “Shit!” exclaimed Mrs. Kim, imitating the men.
I imagined how an owner might say “Shit!” too, after losing a customer — and the pressure that that might place on a woman’s choice, on top of the financial pressure to pay off debts.
Youngnim Yu, the director of Durebang, or “My Sister’s Place,” a South Korean organization that has assisted women in the sex industry since 1986, joined our conversation. While the rules differ at every bar, she explained, a woman usually has to bring in a minimum of around $200 a night. If she doesn’t make the minimum, the owner charges her a “bar fine” as well. She has to go with a man to make up the difference.
Once a month, the promoter who imported the women comes for their salaries. The bar owner pays him a percentage of drink sales, usually at least 50 percent. He tells the government that he pays the women South Korea’s minimum monthly wage, about $900. Typically, the women actually make around $300 to $500 a month.
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Around noon on a scorching hot day in July, I was on the streets of the camptown in Songtan, outside the gates of Osan Air Base. Songtan is one of as many as 180 camptowns in South Korea today. Within 400 yards of Osan’s main gate, there are some 92 bars — about one every 26 feet. In a 2007 count, there were 21 hotels in the area with rooms by the hour.
I was in Songtan to accompany two women from Youngnim Yu’s organization Durebang, whom I will call Valeria and Sohee. They were there to reach out to sex workers in this “special tourist district” and offer the organization’s support.
Special tourist districts are technically off-limits to Koreans not working in them, so most of the people on the streets were from Osan. With the bars and clubs still quiet at midday, we saw airmen and women out walking in their uniforms and a few casually dressed families with strollers. Some men in civilian clothes walked alongside young Filipinas toward fast-food outlets and other restaurants. A few men walked hand in hand with Korean women.
Every few minutes, we came across a Filipina woman. Some were with children. When we did, Valeria and Sohee offered them a Durebang business card written in Tagalog, some toiletries and a “KOREA” shirt donated by supporters. On Songtan’s main pedestrian walkway, we stopped to talk with other outreach workers near Club Join Us, advertising “Filipino Food / Filipina Women.” A couple of young Filipinas walked by, saying they were in a rush. Two more walked hurriedly from a Western Union bearing a sign proclaiming “Cheaper to send to the Philippines!” in Tagalog.
I asked Valeria what the women discuss with her. They complain of not receiving salaries, she said. Some talk about being hurt by owners or customers. Some want to get out but don’t know how. Most have gone deep into debt to get a visa to go to Korea, and most are supporting children and other family members back home. “They cling to the clubs,” she said. The clubs provide apartments, usually on the premises of the bar. Most owners allow the women to leave for just two hours a day. Otherwise, she said, “someone is always watching.”
Most of the women don’t know Korean, and they’re illegal if they leave the bar, Valeria said. Durebang can provide some legal assistance and, in some cases, financial help. “We cannot do anything” about their visa status, said Youngnim, who had joinined our group. So if they leave a club, she said, they’re likely to be deported or put in an immigration jail.
“There are some nasty clubs where women are locked in, but mostly women don’t leave because they are scared,” Veronica, a 24-year-old Russian, told one reporter. A club owner in Songtan agreed, saying, “Some of the women are locked up. If a fire breaks out, they can’t escape. But the main method of coercing them is psychological. They know no one. They have no money. The only way they can get money is by prostituting themselves.” Reydelus Conferido, the labor attaché at the Philippine embassy, says he tries to explain to people, “If you take somebody far from home, under certain conditions, you can get them to do whatever you want. … It could happen to anybody.”
Youngnim explained that the women often “try to get out of the clubs” by finding a GI. It’s a hard life with a different client every day. So they go and live with GI boyfriends. But “practically 90 percent of the women are abandoned,” she said. Many get pregnant and have babies. Some get married, and then the soldier disappears without a word when his tour is done in South Korea, leaving the woman in financial and legal trouble. Having left their clubs, many women are suddenly without a sponsor required to live in Korea. Sometimes they are stuck in legal limbo without an official divorce, and some can’t claim child support. In other cases, Youngnim said, the men get the women to sign documents they don’t understand, and these turn out to be divorce papers that leave them with nothing.
Since the 1970s, GIs have also been involved in sham marriages used to bring Korean women to the United States to perform sex work in Korean massage parlors. Korean divorcées from legitimate marriages have also been vulnerable to recruitment into the parlors. In fact, researchers and law enforcement officers suggest that most Korean women working in U.S. massage parlors were once married to GIs.
There have been more than half a million marriages between Asian women and male GIs since World War II; an estimated 80 percent end in divorce.
Later in the evening, after I left the Durebang outreach workers, I met a woman who said she was from Okinawa (where U.S. military bases occupy nearly 20 percent of the land). With her flowing all-white clothes, very pale skin and long black hair, she looked like a ghost. She said she was “a bum,” pointing to a large duffel bag and several stuffed plastic bags laid out on the sidewalk. She said she needed help. She had been married to a sailor, but now she couldn’t get her money out of the Navy’s bank. They wouldn’t let her on base anymore. They wouldn’t let her onto Osan either. She had “bad karma,” she said. “Bad karma.”
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Toward the end of my walk around Songtan with the Durebang outreach workers, I asked Valeria whether some of the women know what they’re getting into before they arrive.
“Nowadays, they know about the system,” Valeria said. “Most … they know what they’re doing.” But “they have to endure it. They could never earn this kind of money in the Philippines.”
Even so, while many women now seem to know the general nature of the work that usually comes with an entertainer visa, deceptive recruiting strategies, outright misrepresentation and employers violating contracts with impunity are the norm. A woman named Lori, who got an entertainer visa in the Philippines to go to South Korea in 2005, said that she was among those who did not know the true nature of “the system” before arriving. She “thought that we really have to sing because we sign a contract as a singer,” she said. Now, she feels stuck at the club, hating the sex work but unable to leave for financial reasons. “I talked with some girls and said, ‘I really can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go with any guy,’” Lori recounted. “A girl told me, ‘As long as you think about your family, your child, or other people you love, you will take all the men, and you won’t think about yourself.’ I was thinking if I don’t have a debt to pay in the Philippines, I would go back in the Philippines and not stay here even for a second.”
A case from the U.S. Army’s operations in Bosnia illustrates the extreme end of the spectrum. In 1999, two employees of major military contractor DynCorp accused DynCorp of turning a blind eye while their employees colluded with the Serbian mafia and bought women as sex slaves. One 45-year-old man “owned a girl,” one of the whistleblowers said, “who couldn’t have been more than fourteen.”
The other whistle-blower discovered seven trafficked women in a club “huddled together on bare mattresses on the floor. Condoms strung over the garbage can, plastic bags of their street clothes and working clothes, just terrified. Beaten and terrified.”
Following instructions from the Army, DynCorp officials removed at least 18 of its employees from Bosnia, firing at least 12. Emails show that DynCorp officials knew the problem was even more widespread than these individual cases, but that they took little other action. Instead, one official commented that the swift firings had allowed DynCorp “to turn this into a marketing success.” Along with firing some of the worst perpetrators, DynCorp also fired the two whistle-blowers. (Both sued DynCorp for wrongful termination; their stories form the basis for the 2011 film The Whistleblower.)
Meanwhile, back in Bosnia, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command referred the case to local police and closed its investigation without examining the trafficking allegations or speaking to any of the women involved. None of the accused were prosecuted, and no DynCorp official faced prosecution.
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It’s easy to condemn male military personnel for taking advantage of often-exploitative sex industries in places like South Korea and the Balkans. But as a soldier who runs ROK Drop, a popular blog about the military in South Korea, points out, it’s wrong to blame the soldiers alone. The policies of United States Forces Korea “ensure this type of activity will continue around the U.S. camps.” It’s hypocritical, he says: Training programs are “telling soldiers to drink responsibly and stay away from juicy girls, but what environment do we create for the soldiers to spend most of their free time in? A ville [camptown] filled with cheap booze and prostitutes.”
The dearth of other recreational opportunities may be a factor. But at issue are also the broader American military culture, and the sexism and patriarchy found in the United States, Korea and much of the world. The behavior of men who take advantage of exploitative sex industries is often excused as a matter of “boys will be boys” — as merely natural behavior for male soldiers. In fact, there’s little about the behavior that’s natural. Men on military bases and women in camptowns find themselves in a highly unnatural situation, one that’s been created by a series of decisions made over time (mostly by male military and government officials). Those decisions have created a predominantly male military environment, where women’s visible presence is overwhelmingly reduced to one role: sex.
Ultimately, the effects of military prostitution are felt not just by women abroad whose bodies are used and too often abused, trafficked and exploited. They’re also felt by the family members, coworkers and others who are part of troops’ lives. Attitudes fostered by commercial sex zones carry over dangerously into GIs’ lives — both on base and at home. Institutionalized military prostitution trains men to believe that using the sexual services of women is part of what it means to be a soldier and, indeed, part of what it means to be a man. Given the ubiquitous nature of camptown prostitution in South Korea in particular, men deployed to the country frequently have their ideas about what it means to be a man transformed. Along with the sexually objectifying entertainment of USO shows (think the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders), pervasive pornography in the services and training infused with sexist epithets, camptown prostitution helps produce a military culture of sexism, misogyny and the dehumanization of women.
Thus, when we try to understand recurring incidents of rape and sexual assault perpetrated by troops in places like Okinawa, or the epidemic rates of rape and sexual assault now found in the military, we can’t overlook men’s experiences in the camptowns. As one advocate for the victims of military sexual violence explains, “You can’t expect to treat women as one of your own when, in the same breath, you as a young soldier are being encouraged to exploit women on the outside of that base.”
David Vine is associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, DC. This article has been adapted from his latest book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, published by Metropolitan Books, a division of Henry Holt and Company (c) David Vine 2015. All rights reserved.