Unheard Victims: Comfort Women
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Wars have many different victims. Many in the present day you see via social media or television media. The victims of wars many years ago are the ones who we should try to expose what was done to them many years ago. The victims during wars in those years did not have social media and their silence is now because of death or of old age. This article will delve into one of the most unknown and grave human right violations throughout Asia at the time.
The fact that comfort women had been around within the last century is something that many find quite the travesty if they know what had gone on. There were Korean comfort women and Japanese comfort women during the 1940’s and 1950’s. These women were forced into prostitution by the government for a variety of reasons.
These reasons are, in this writer’s personal opinion, some of the most devious of all time. The reasoning for these women differed depending on which government was instituting the forced prostitution. The Japanese used these women to enhance their soldiers morale. The Japanese also wanted to keep the cases of military disobedience down by giving them prostitutes to keep them distracted and happy. The Korean government instituted the comfort stations to keep the US soldiers who were in their territories during conflict in high spirits. Politicians were even heard to say that they should train more comfort women for economic reasons. These reasons are to have the US soldiers spend their money with Korean girls instead of going over the border to Japan to spend time with their prostitutes.
The fact of how the girls were obtained for these comfort stations have been told differently by different government entities. Of course, the governments in question were very unclear and told blatant lies about this. The girls were supposed to be volunteers but there are thousands of women who tell a much different story. Some of the comfort women were even kidnapped in the middle of the night by the occupying troops that had the upper hand in the territory the girls came from. Other times, the girls were promised jobs in factories or as nurses only to be taken to the comfort stations.
One may ask why the girls didn’t refuse to participate? The girls who refused were executed in a public fashion so as to intimidate the girls into cooperating. There are not many of the comfort women left as there were quite a few killed during their time in the comfort stations. Nearly three quarters of the girls who were comfort girls didn’t make it past their time at the stations. Many of these women took emotional and physical abuse that many people couldn’t imagine. Many of the women now, nearly sixty years later, are still suffering the mental trauma that went along with such treatment.
As you can see, there have been people who are forgotten after war. Not all of these people have been directly impacted by war but rather as collateral damage because their human rights have been violated, and sometimes these human rights by their own governments. It’s critical that people be made aware of such cruelties so that history doesn’t repeat itself.
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History, sadly, always repeats itself – eventually. Great article!
Thank you for recognizing these women. They were treated like so much chattel and never compensated.