Sex workers near US bases are trapped by debt, passport confiscation, and coercion.

Evidence

The women sign a contract in their home country specifying an employer and a salary, but they often end up in different clubs and working for a lower salary than promised. The promoters and owners often charge hidden fees or deduct money from the women’s salaries, keeping them in perpetual debt. Often the housing and food promised in contracts is little more than a decrepit shared room above the bar and ramen noodles. In some clubs, owners force women to perform sex work in “VIP rooms” or other locations. In other clubs, indebtedness and psychological coercion force the women into sex. Speaking little Korean, the women have little recourse. Promoters and bar owners often hold the women’s passports. Leaving their place of employment would subject them to immediate arrest, fines, imprisonment, or deportation by the South Korean state and potentially violent retribution from those to whom they are indebted. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 494

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly connects to ‘On Sacrifice’ themes of coercion and the state’s complicity in exploitation of vulnerable people, though the primary resonance is with the book’s core thesis on how bases harm.
• XREF: Connects to exploitation-of-labor economics themes, similar to modern indentured servitude discussions and to the ethics of prostitution law generally.