Korean Survivors of the Japanese “Comfort Women” System: Understanding the Lifelong Consequences of Early Life Trauma

Abstract

Prior to and during World War II, thousands of girls and young women were abducted from Korea and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese government. Termed comfort women, these girls and young women suffered extreme sexual, physical, and emotional abuse and trauma. Research on this group is not well-developed and people know little of the impact of this early life trauma on the lives of these women who are now in later life. Using snowball sampling, 16 older adult survivors of the comfort women system participated in semistructured qualitative interviews. Thematic analysis was conducted to gain an understanding of the trauma that these women suffered and how it impacted their lives. Results revealed the depths of the abuse these women suffered, including repeated rapes, physical beatings, humiliation, forced surgery and sterilization, and social exclusion. These early traumatic experiences appeared to reverberate throughout their lives in their family relations, their inability to marry and to conceive children, and their emotional and physical well-being throughout the life course and into later life. The experiences of these survivors illustrate the lasting impact of early-life trauma and can guide interventions with current survivors of sexual abuse or trafficking.

Double-Edged Network Effects on Disclosing Traumatic Experiences Among Korean “Comfort Women”

“…Results were visualized through Gephi (0.9.6). We used the Korean Natural Language Processing (KoNLP) package for word frequency comparison with a bag of word approach in order to grasp central themes from corpus (Baron et al, 2009;Heimerl et al, 2014;Paley, 2002) and visualized results with the gglot2 package in R (4.2.1).…”

“…Survivors from these comfort stations returned to society with severe trauma after the end of the war. In addition to psychiatric disorders, alcohol use disorder, bodily pain, infertility, and venereal diseases, they confronted social exclusion (Chinkin, 2001;Lee et al, 2018;Min, 2003Min, , 2021Park et al, 2016). Their experiences at comfort stations violated the strong Confucian patriarchal values concerning chastity, which was key to survivors avoiding having to confide their whereabouts and experiences during the war (Min, 2003).…”

Psychiatric Sequelae of Former “Comfort Women,” Survivors of the Japanese Military Sexual Slavery during World War II

“…In 2013, Park et al [ 9 ] conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 16 former “comfort women” in order to evaluate the impact of this early-life trauma on the lives of the survivors. The study provided understanding of the types and depth of the trauma, as well as the impact it had on the life course of the survivors.…”

“…One study on 27 elderly wartime rape survivors showed that women exposed to sexual violence during World War II reported greater severity of posttraumatic stress disorder-related avoidance and hyperarousal symptoms, as well as anxiety, compared to female with non-sexual World War II trauma [ 22 ]. Further, the effect of sexual abuse is cumulative, thus severity of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms increases with more incidents of abuse and increased severity of abuse [ 23 ] Many documents report that “comfort women” were forced to have sex with as many as 30–40 soldiers per day [ 9 ]. Therefore, it is not surprising that the prevalence rate of posttraumatic stress disorder in former “comfort women” are higher than other victims of war trauma or even the Holocaust survivors.…”

Book review: The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during the China and Pacific Wars by Caroline Norma

“…In Chapter 1, the author outlines the distortions that perpetuate the scapegoating of the girls and young women in the Comfort Women programme, most notably that ‘most were from the sex industry, and are therefore not seen as victims of the system’ (p. 29). The author also discusses the more recent Justice for the Comfort Women movement and the efforts (often frustrated) to recognise the injustices that these girls and young women experienced, as well as to seek restitution and reparations for the lifelong consequences of this early-life trauma (Park et al , 2016). Chapters 2 and 3 delve into the history of prostitution in Japan beginning in the early 1900s and leading up to the 1930s.…”