When Men Buy and Sell Women

In the regions of China bordering on North Korea men are now buying and selling
North Korean women like chattels,
Donna M. Hughes reports.

Women and children are increasingly the majority of refugees
crossing the river into China. If they can locate a friend or relative’s
house, they have a chance at finding a safe haven. But if the ethnic
Korean Chinese traffickers find them first, they are abducted and sold,
either to men as informal wives or concubines or to karaoke clubs for
prostitution. Their price and destination are determined by their age
and appearance... Kidnapping and trafficking have
become common ways that Chinese men acquire women.

The reason that these women can be victimized is that they are illegal immigrants
into China and thus have no legal rights. If found by the Chinese police they are
sent back to North Korea and imprisonment or worse.

We in the United States are arguing over a Supreme Court nomination in
which the issues are, to be frank, marginal, probably no more extreme than a
reversal of Roe v. Wade that would send abortion back to the states. I.e., in the
worst case for liberals, they will be able to construct their own abortion
laws in their blue-state redoubts instead of relying the U.S. Supreme Court to
do it for them.

But on the borders of China and North Korea, in the twilight of the Kim dynasty
the issue is life and death. It is about people migrating away from their homes
and their relatives into a lawless, stateless existence where they become
prey not to the “robber barons of the mountain passes” that liberal hacks conjure out of nothing
to stigmatize creative businessmen, but real robber barons robbing, killing, and enslaving vulnerable
people desperately searching for simple survival.

We can see, when viewing people in extremis, that government and law
are not mere questions of narrative and power. Settled government and the rule
of law really do make people safer and, most important of all, protect women
from sexual predation.

Can we agree that the first duty of government is to protect women
from sexual predation?