General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20268 min read

Prostitution in South Korea

Prostitution in South Korea is illegal: buying and selling sex, arranging it, providing premises or financing for it, and trafficking for the purpose of prostitution are all criminal offenses under the Act on the Punishment of Arrangement of Commercial Sex Acts (성매매알선 등 행위의 처벌에 관한 법률), abbreviated in Korean as the 성매매처벌법. The same law exempts people identified as victims of prostitution from punishment and obliges the state to fund prevention and protection programs.¹ The sex industry's modern form was shaped decades before the current prohibitionist framework by the Korean state itself, which organized and regulated prostitution around United States military bases as a source of foreign exchange during the Cold War.²

Key fact	Detail
Legal status	Prohibited. Buying, selling, arranging, advertising, and financing sex for money are all offenses under the Act on the Punishment of Arrangement of Commercial Sex Acts.¹
Victim protection	Article 6(1): a prostitution victim's act of prostitution is not punished.¹
Maximum penalties	Up to 10 years' imprisonment or a 100 million won fine for forcing a person to sell sex by assault, threat, or abuse of a guardianship or employment relationship.¹
Camptown scale	Saewoomtuh, an association founded in 1996, estimates 200,000 women were recruited into camptown prostitution between the 1950s and the 1990s.³
Economic weight	Durebang, a support group working with camptown women since 1986, estimated prostitution for American soldiers accounted for up to 1% of South Korea's GDP in that era.³
Trafficking assessment	The US State Department demoted South Korea from tier 1 to tier 2 in its 2022 Trafficking in Persons Report.⁴

The current legal framework

The defining statute defines "prostitution" (성매매) as performing, with an unspecified person in exchange for money or other economic benefit (or agreeing to such an exchange), sexual intercourse or an analogous act using a body part or an instrument. "Arrangement" covers soliciting, inducing, luring, or coercing a person into prostitution, providing premises for it, and knowingly supplying funds, land, or buildings for it. The prohibited acts also include hiring or recruiting someone for the purpose of selling sex, job placement made with knowledge that the work is prostitution, and advertising for the prohibited acts or the businesses where they occur.¹ An official English title is the Act on the Punishment of Arrangement of Commercial Sex Acts.⁵

Penalties scale with coercion. Causing a person to sell sex through assault or threat, through a scheme that puts the person in difficulty, or through abuse of a family, employment, or guardianship relationship carries up to 10 years' imprisonment or a fine of up to 100 million won. Forcing prostitution by confinement or by the power of a group or crowd, and forcing an employee to undergo abortion or sterilization by violence or threat, carries at least 3 years. Offenses committed for payment, against minors or people unable to make decisions, or by members of violent criminal organizations carry at least 1 year, and using drugs on a person under one's protection or supervision to make them sell sex carries at least 5 years.¹

Victims are not prosecuted. Article 6 states that a prostitution victim's prostitution is not punished. Investigators who have reasonable grounds to believe a suspect or person of interest is a victim must promptly notify a legal guardian, relative, or attorney, and take protective measures such as personal protection, non-disclosure of the investigation, or referral to counseling centers and support facilities. Whistleblowers may not be disadvantaged for reporting, and support facilities are obliged to report suspected victimization to law enforcement.¹ A companion statute, the Act on the Prevention of Prostitution and Protection of Victims (성매매피해자보호법), directs the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family to survey the actual state of prostitution, including paid dating (성접대), every three years.⁶

Camptown prostitution, 1945 to the 1990s

The sex industry organized around US military bases, known in Korean as kijich'on (기지촌), or "garrison villages," is the most heavily studied strand of the history. The US Army Military Government laid its foundation beginning in September 1945, when the 24th Army Corps, about 70,000 soldiers, arrived to take over power from the collapsed Japanese colonial empire; the system was built on Japan's licensed prostitution regime, and camptown prostitution was systematically established only in the mid-1950s.⁷ As the Korean government came to conceptualize prostitution as a necessary means of entertaining and retaining foreign soldiers during the anticommunist war and, later, of securing national security during the Cold War, the concentration of prostitutes around rest and recreation facilities developed into camptown prostitution.⁸

State sponsorship was explicit. In 1961 Gyeonggi Province, which neighbors Seoul and hosts major bases, judged it "urgent to prepare large-scale facilities for comfort women to support UN troops," according to a directive included in the plaintiffs' case file of the 2025 lawsuit; the sites were also expected to "bring in foreign currency" for South Korea, then among the poorest nations on earth. In 1960 the province had already authorized private clubs, organized within a "Korean association for special tourists," to recruit women. Kijichon districts were set up in Pyeongtaek, near Camp Humphreys, and in Dongducheon, next to Camp Casey, and these districts still operate today without official status.³ Under the Park Chung-Hee government, camptown bars and clubs were designated "special tourism facilities businesses" entitled to tax-free alcohol under the Tourism Promotion Law, and reciprocated by paying into government coffers monthly. A year after outlawing prostitution, in 1962 the government established 104 "special districts," including 32 military camptowns, with a legalized sex industry; camptown economies contributed significantly to earning foreign exchange, especially during the 1960s.²

Scholarship on the Park era (1961 to 1979) characterizes its policy as a "toleration-regulation regime" combining prohibition and regulation. The Yullak Prevention Act of 1961 was prohibitionist on paper, specifying that all parties to prostitution must be punished, but because it failed to curb the growth of the sex industry most scholars consider it "an empty declaration" or "a dead letter."⁹

Conditions inside the kijichon

Recruitment and retention were built on deception and debt. Establishments were filled with girls from poor families, some abducted or abused by fake employment agencies promising work as housemaids, others tricked by acquaintances. Pimps kept all client payments, usually between 5 and 10 dollars per visit, and controlled women through manufactured debts covering clothes, makeup, soap, and medical care; one woman recalled that the debt kept increasing however long she stayed. Officials told the women they were "patriots" who had to be nice to American soldiers, while privately calling them "dollar-earning machines."³

State-run clinics enforced disease control. Starting in 1971, after representatives of the US military raised hygiene concerns, the government set up clinics nicknamed "monkey houses." Women infected with sexually transmitted infections were locked up until they recovered and injected with penicillin doses up to 10 times normal levels, and some died as a result. One such clinic, surrounded by barbed wire, still stands on Mount Soyo overlooking the Dongducheon kijichon; activists are fighting its planned demolition.³

Based on a tally put together by Saewoomtuh, 11 sex workers in South Korea were killed by American servicemen, who received murder convictions, over the period from 1960 to 2004.³

Anti-prostitution policy since 2004

The 2004 law banning prostitution also provides a framework for the government to grant subsidies to nonprofit organizations that support former camptown women. Recipients of state support receive the equivalent of the local welfare benefit plus an annual allowance of 500,000 won per person, introduced in 2020 by Lee Jae-myung while he was governor of Gyeonggi (2018 to 2021).¹⁰ Geographical scholarship on Anjeong-ri, the camptown next to Camp Humphreys, the largest US military base abroad, contends that anti-prostitution policies since 2004 have played a crucial role in shoring up American militarization within Korea's urban areas: Korean actors involved in development draw on racial, gendered, sexual, and class hierarchies to set the camptown apart from the sex trade and to portray it as a place of "militarised urban prosperity."¹¹

The former camptown districts persist unofficially, now populated mainly by foreign women, including Russians and Filipinas, who live there because it is less expensive and they have no access to a pension.³

Litigation and redress

On September 8, 2025, 117 former camptown women filed a lawsuit against the US military, the first such action in a country that still hosts American bases; there are currently 73 US bases in South Korea with 28,000 soldiers stationed. Each plaintiff seeks 10 million won (about 5,800 euros). The suit alleges the US military illegally promoted and managed a network of prostitution around its bases.³^•¹⁰

Trafficking enforcement

South Korean women are subjected to forced prostitution in South Korea and abroad. Since 2008, the government has investigated 457 reported cases of human trafficking, indicted 167 cases, and obtained 14 sex trafficking convictions and 53 labor trafficking convictions, while maintaining victim protection efforts.¹² An NGO coalition report to the CEDAW committee noted that victims unable to prove "coercion into prostitution" are penalized, and international sex-trafficking victims are subjected to either penalization or deportation; the US State Department demoted South Korea from tier 1 to tier 2 in its 2022 Trafficking in Persons Report.⁴ In 2025 the government's Committee on Prevention of Violence discussed countermeasures based on that year's government prostitution survey, including responses to online sexual exploitation and closure of prostitution gathering places.¹³

Historical background of the abolitionist movement

An organized women's abolitionist movement against prostitution in Korea dates to the Japanese colonial period (1910 to 1945) and the US military government (1945 to 1948), when campaigns sought the abolition of licensed prostitution (폐창운동); scholarship traces the movement's historical formation and change across these two periods.¹⁴

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 17, 2026; Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026