A Special Kind of ¡®Entertainer¡¯: Korea is a Leading Importer of Foreign ¡®Intergirls¡¯

Lee Mu-young, Kim Seung-hyun, and Namgung Uk

Lee Mu-young, Kim Seung-hyun, and Namgung Uk. 2002. ¡°A Special Kind of ¡®Entertainer¡¯: Korea is a Leading Importer of Foreign ¡®Intergirls¡¯.¡± JoongAng Daily, December 8, 2002.


ecember 8, 2002 — At around midnight on the streets near Gangnam subway station, in southern Seoul, a man approached the male passers-by, saying, ¡°You can have a sex with a pretty Russian girl.¡± One man accepted his solicitations, so the hawker took him to a nearby hotel. He then called a pimp who controls dozens of Russian women. The hawker and the pimp asked 300,000 won ($245) from their new customer. In front of a hotel at the Suanbo spa area in North Chungcheong province, a man in his 30s approached the JoongAng Ilbo special reporting team and said, ¡°We have slim Russian women.¡± The team followed him into the nightclub of a hotel. A Russian woman who had been dancing on the stage in a bikini joined the team in a private room. She introduced herself in broken Korean, and after a couple of drinks, a waiter came to the team and suggested paying for her sexual services.

These so-called ¡°Intergirls¡± are rushing into Korea. An increasing number of foreign women are coming to Korea to work in Korean entertainment spots such as bars, nightclubs and red-light districts. The intergirls come to Korea on entertainment visas, just like performers or singers. But most of them end up as prostitutes. According to the Justice Ministry, 5,762 women came to Korea on entertainment visas in the first 10 months of 2002, a 13-fold increase from 1992 when 430 foreign women came.

Experts say that they suspect 10,000 of these women are in Korea now, making the country one of the largest importers of foreign women in the world. From the entertainment spots in the center of Seoul to small villages in the countryside, Intergirls are everywhere in Korea. On Nov. 19, the Yeonggwang police station in South Jeolla province arrested four women from former Soviet republics. They were working as prostitutes in such small villages as Hongnong in South Jeolla province, which has a population of 8,000. ¡°We have international prostitution in this small farm village. Can you think of the situation in big cities?¡± said a police officer at the Yeong-gwang station.

The women come to Korea because it is the easiest to enter among the countries that offer relatively high wages. ¡°For Russian women who want to work abroad, Korea is their favorite destination,¡± said a Russian woman who is working in a nightclub in Yongsan. She continued, ¡°I originally wanted to go to Japan, but I couldn¡¯t get an entry visa even if I waited for more than one year. Korea gave me a visa in just a couple of months.¡±

The Korean government readily gives entertainment visas to foreign women who are not entertainers, just as long as the woman pretends to be a dancer or singer and submit a couple of photos. While other countries have increasingly made it hard for such women to enter their countries, Korea has eased the process.

For these women, who are mostly from poor countries, Korea is a dream country, because they can earn wages 10 times higher than in their own countries. A Filipina who used to earn $3 a day in a textile factory said that she now receives 1 million won per month working as a dancer in a nightclub in Korea.

Korean nightclubs and brothels say they hire foreign women because Korean men like white women. ¡°Korean men are dying for Russian girls,¡± said the owner of a club who was arrested for arranging prostitutes for Korean men and his Russian employees.

¡°Men around me bragged that they had slept with ¡®white horses.¡¯ I wanted to sleep with a white Russian girl, too,¡± said an office worker who was arrested right after he had sex with a Russian prostitute. According to an Internet portal¡¯s survey of 245 white-collar workers, more than half of the men said they went to places where foreign women appear. Thirty percent answered that they had been propositioned there.

Seol Dong-Hoon, a sociology professor at Chonbuk National University, said, ¡°Things such as the male-oriented culture of sex in Korea and poor immigration policies of the government aggravate the Intergirl problem.¡± by Special Reporting Team [Lee Mu-young, Kim Seung-hyun, and Namgung Uk]