Did Korea encourage sex work at US bases?

[nitpicker]

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30212673

27 November 2014 Last updated at 19:18 ET
Did Korea encourage sex work at US bases?
By Stephen Evans
BBC News, Seoul

More than 120 former prostitutes who worked near a US military base in South Korea are going to court to seek compensation from the Korean government. They say the authorities actively facilitated their work - and that the system has left them in poverty now that they are old.

For as long as armies have gathered in garrisons, ramshackle "camp-towns" have grown up around them. In South Korea, they reach right up to the walls of US bases - by night, they throb with music and neon, by day, they seem to recover from the night before.

They are now the scene of an intriguing legal dispute. More than 120 former prostitutes, who are ageing and poor, are suing not the American authorities but their own government, demanding compensation of $10,000 (£6,360) each. Their argument is that the South Korean government facilitated their work in order to keep American forces happy.

In a community centre next to the US base at Uijeongbu City in South Korea, a group of them gather to explain their case. "We worked all night long. What I want is for the Korean government to recognise that this is a system that it created... and also compensation."

Their argument is not that South Korea compelled them to work as prostitutes - this is not a case of sexual slavery - but that by instituting a system of official and compulsory check-ups on their sexual health, it was complicit, and facilitated a system which now leaves them in poverty. It also, they say, gave them English lessons and courses in "Western etiquette".
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