The Unspoken Pain: Forced Silence

The Weight of Suppressed Voices In a world where speaking out often becomes a means of survival, North Korean women find themselves silenced by fear, stigma, and the looming threat of retaliation. The silence they are forced into is not just a personal burden; it's a collective muffling of cries for justice, rights, and recognition.

The Consequences of Silence Forced silence isn't just the absence of voice. It's the suppression of rights, stories, and identities. This silence leaves emotional and psychological scars, perpetuating a cycle of trauma and preventing healing. In the shadows, many victims suffer in isolation, their stories untold and their pain unrecognized.

The Need for Change: Victim Centered Accountability

Placing the Victim at the Core Accountability, to be truly meaningful, must revolve around those who have suffered the most. Victim-centered accountability prioritizes the experiences, needs, and rights of the victims. It recognizes their pain, validates their experiences, and ensures that justice is both seen and felt.

Bridging the Gap: From Silence to Recognition For too long, the narratives of North Korean women have been overshadowed by political agendas and diplomatic negotiations. A shift towards victim-centered accountability ensures that their voices rise above the din, leading to policies and actions that genuinely reflect their needs and aspirations.

The Way Forward: Empowerment through Recognition To break the chains of forced silence, we must create platforms where victims are heard, recognized, and empowered. By centering accountability around them, we pave the way for healing, justice, and a future where their rights are unconditionally upheld.

The answer to victim-centered accountability is simpler than you might think. Rather than having witnesses misunderstand accountability through the media, we believe that victim-centered accountability is the process of having a final review of the testimonies that will be released through seminars or workshops with the witnesses after the report is completed and before the final release, so that they can understand exactly what human rights will be improved when the report is released, what measures will be taken in the field of these human rights violations, the efforts of the organizations conducting the research, why the United Nations and the international community need this report, and the impact of these reports.

However, in the past, most of the North Korean human rights reports were conducted by investigators who did not have the same experience and lacked an understanding of North Korea, from surveys to testimonies to secure data on human rights violations, so North Korean defectors responded in a passive checking method when they were asked about terms they did not understand, and when they testified, they answered roughly if they did not understand the other person and compressed their testimonies to finish the testimony quickly. However, the North Korean defector women researchers were quick to respond to the same situation because they had the same experience, and if the testimonies were difficult to summarize, they instead proceeded by accurately judging and analyzing the details of the testimonies and the scale of the damage while testifying.

North Korean women in China have been excluded from North Korean human rights issues. There is a misconception among some domestic human rights organizations and experts that North Korean women's rights are a Chinese issue while they are being trafficked and sold to Chinese men, and only after they are forcibly repatriated to North Korea do they demand an end to their forced repatriation. In order to improve human rights in North Korea, the organization found that it is necessary to correct the wrong view of North Korean women who are currently living as trafficked women in China as a Chinese problem, so that the root cause of forced repatriation can be solved with a victim-centered approach and process. The 2022 Human Rights Report on Forced Repatriation of North Korean Women in China, the result of the RFNK's five-year North Korean human rights activities, concluded that the Chinese government must be held jointly responsible with the North Korean government as a suspect for the forced repatriation of North Korean defectors, which is the key to improving North Korean human rights, and that the vicious circle of forced repatriation can only be resolved through a victim-centered approach and process.