Relationships And Pregnancy
As you can imagine there is no real chance of family life inside, despite entire families routinely being incarcerated together. Intimate relationships are not allowed, the North Koreans don’t want political dissidents to spread your poisonous seed. On rare occasions prison guards may reward particularly obedient inmates by playing cupid. They create their own forced marriages and taking part is not optional. These “married” couples are allowed to be intimate on rare occasions and sometimes a child is born, this poor waif will be brought up, live and die within the camp’s walls.
Women who become pregnant outside of these arrangements are subject to forced abortion, torture and possible execution.
One witness was sent to Political Prison Camp No. 18 whilst pregnant. Towards the end of her pregnancy, she was kicked by a guard hard enough to trigger premature labour. When the child was born, guards beat her until they could pull away the crying baby from her. She lost consciousness because of her ordeal. When she woke up she found her baby dead. The body was gathered with other corpses in a storeroom until enough corpses had accumulated to merit throwing them into a single grave. Still in pain and bleeding, the witness was forced to work the next day and beaten because she could not keep up with her work quota.
Unlike other types of torture, rape as such is not condoned by camp rules. Instead, SSD agents and guards are under strict orders not to fraternize with the inmates and in particular not to have any sexual engagement with them. However, if cases of rape come to light, the perpetrator often escapes with a mere dismissal or no punishment at all. The victim, however, is frequently reassigned to harsh labour or secretly executed, especially if she becomes pregnant.
Without exception, pregnant victims are subject to abortion or their child is killed at birth. Mr Ahn Myong-chol gave testimony that, unlike ordinary guards, higher-ranking SSD agents could get away with sexually abusing female inmates, as long as the women did not become pregnant. In cases of pregnancy, the official was dismissed and the women sent to harsh mining work or secretly executed. On one occasion, the commander of his unit raped a woman, who became pregnant and gave birth to a baby. The mother and her child were taken to the detention and punishment block where the baby was thrown in the feeding bowl for the dogs.
A former guard in Camp No. 11 described how the camp authorities made female inmates available for sexual abuse to a very senior official who regularly visited the camp. After the official raped the women the victims were killed.
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