South Korea has an active sex trade. Such is the visibility of massage parlors, room salons and karaoke joints that facilitate prostitution that a first-time visitor to a Korean city could be forgiven for thinking the sex trade was legal. Even some 40 percent of Koreans claimed to be unaware that prostitution was illegal in a survey carried out in , before the introduction of the Special Law on Prostitution that criminalizes both the buying and selling of sex.
In a survey of men who visit brothels, In the s β and to some degree today β massage parlors operated out of barber shops. In , President Roh Moo-hyun stressed the need for establishing a "healthy consumption culture," implying money should be spent on things other than the sex trade. April 15, ]. Prostitutes wanting their work decriminalized were the ones who brought the suit to challenge existing laws. The review stems from a case involving a year-old prostitute indicted for having sex with a year-old man for money.
Three of its nine justices fiercely criticized what they called a government crackdown on women driven to prostitution by desperate circumstances. That approach changed after , when 14 young prostitutes died in a fire, trapped in their rooms. Amid a public outcry, the government enacted the statute, which not only outlaws prostitution but calls on the authorities to take active measures to eradicate it.
An aggressive campaign against the sex trade followed, and some prostitutes fought back. In , Kim Jeong-mi, a Seoul prostitute, filed the challenge that the court rejected. There had been previous challenges to the law, all unsuccessful, but Ms. A few prostitutes who listened to the ruling in court said they were saddened and outraged. Two other dissenting justices, Kim Yi-su and Kang Il-won, argued that the state should help rehabilitate prostitutes rather than punish them with a criminal charge.
The Korean Women Lawyers Association issued a statement welcoming the ruling, saying that if prostitution were legalized, more minors would be drawn into the trade. She declined to be interviewed. Businessmen sometimes arrange illicit sexual encounters in exchange for deals.
