What can you do with 35 cents? You can’t buy a burrito in a BYU vending machine. But you could buy a North Korean woman.  Human traffickers in China sell them for 400-3,000 won ($.35-2.50).

Since the miserable failure of North Korea’s currency devaluation in 2009, the country has been experiencing a severe food crisis. Desperately hoping for a better life in China, many North Korean women choose to be sold at the North Korean-Chinese border. 

Risking their lives to cross the border is only the beginning of their painful journey. First, they are priced based on their physical beauty like dogs on sale. Then they are sold for prostitution, intense labor in rural farms, or both. In fact, they are often labeled “North Korean pigs.” Human traffickers and people who “consume” these women regard them as animals whose human dignities they can violate without consequence. This nightmare becomes reality for North Korean women who are forced to flee from their mother country seeking survival.

Another issue that further intensifies the problem is that of the lives of children born during this process. The women are criminals in both North Korea and China. If any North Korean defector is caught and repatriated to North Korea, they are guilty of a federal crime against the Kim Jong-il regime. Consequently, they are sent to detention centers where they are interrogated and tortured (if they are not already dead). And if the defector happens to be pregnant? She is forced to abort the child. What if the baby is born alive? The baby is killed. To the Chinese government, the defectors are not refugees, but illegal immigrants, and because of their unstable social standing, their children have neither North Korean nor Chinese nationality—they belong nowhere. It is almost impossible to gather any demographic statistics on these children because they do not exist on any legal paper work.

A vicious cycle ensues as the defectors and their children struggle to survive on the hostile Chinese soil. In order to protect the children from Chinese government (or to raise money), the mothers sell their children to human traffickers. It is hard to believe or accept that these mothers put their own children into the same sadistic industry that has caused them to suffer so much, but there aren’t many options to choose from: would you rather live as a slave or a prisoner? They sound similar, but at least you can know what to expect as the former (who knows what happens in Chinese prisons?). Besides being sold to human traffickers, the children often get separated from their mothers in the midst of the chaos of fleeing and hiding.

North Koreans cannot walk freely in foreign lands because they don’t enjoy freedom. They starve for food; they put their lives in jeopardy to cross the border; and even if they get across, they are exploited like farm animals or sexual toys. They cannot even promise a better life for their children. They are mothers, sisters, and daughters, but their dignity and rights are violated in exchange for 35 cents.