They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the s through the s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops.
Scholars on the issue say that the South Korean government was motivated in part by fears that the American military would leave, and that it wanted to do whatever it could to prevent that. They say the government not only sponsored classes for them in basic English and etiquette — meant to help them sell themselves more effectively — but also sent bureaucrats to praise them for earning dollars when South Korea was desperate for foreign currency.
Kim said. The United States military, the scholars say, became involved in attempts to regulate the trade in so-called camp towns surrounding the bases because of worries about sexually transmitted diseases.
In one of the most incendiary claims, some women say that the American military police and South Korean officials regularly raided clubs from the s through the s looking for women who were thought to be spreading the diseases.
They picked out the women using the number tags the women say the brothels forced them to wear so the soldiers could more easily identify their sex partners. The Korean police would then detain the prostitutes who were thought to be ill, the women said, locking them up under guard in so-called monkey houses, where the windows had bars.
