
North Korea (DPRK) – Call for Women to Have Children + Report for the CEDAW Committee Review
Author: Administrator
Date: June 30, 2023
North Korea – Call for Women to Bear Children for the Motherland. They Aren’t.
The DPRK’s fertility rate is sliding down and its population aging despite the state’s pro-natalist policies.
Andrei Lankov January 17, 2022
South Korea is experiencing a demographic disaster these days: Its total fertility rate (TFR), the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime, has dropped below the psychologically important 1.0 mark, and the COVID-19 pandemic is driving it even lower. The TFR should be 2.1-2.2 to maintain a stable population, but costly government efforts to keep the country’s TFR above the 1.2-1.3 level have ended in spectacular failure.
But what about North Korea? Much like in the South, the North has both encouraged and discouraged childbearing over the years, with its population policy going through three distinct phases of pro-fertility from 1945-1970, family planning from the early 1970s to early 1990s and now back to the pro-natalist approach since around 1993.
This latest phase under Kim Jong Il and now Kim Jong Un has been limited to propaganda statements extolling the greatness of childbearing and insisting that Korean women should have more children. In 2018, for instance, the Rodong Sinmun editorialized that “all women must give birth to even more children, for the sake of the motherland’s future.”
North Korean women are not impressed. The country’s fertility rate keeps slowly sliding down, reaching an estimated 1.9 in 2019. While not as bad as in the South, the figure is unusually low for such a poor country. The result is that North Korea is one of the few countries that has seen its population begin to age while still poor, and it is doubtful whether government policies can reverse this process.
Needless to say, this does not bode well for the country’s future. The manifold problems created by population aging are well-known, and in a poor country like North Korea these are more difficult to handle.

BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY
When North Korea was founded in 1945, Marxism-Leninism and its ideologues were remarkably sanguine about population growth. The assumption was that women should give birth to as many children as possible, providing the socialist motherland with soldiers and workers.
Yet irrespective of communist regimes’ theoretical commitment to maximum production, the fertility rate kept going down in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China as ex-farmers left their villages in droves for cities where they found jobs in the industrial economy, attended schools and learned the basics of modernity. In the USSR, for instance, the TFR declined from 6.3 in pre-revolutionary 1915 to 2.85 in 1953 when Stalin died and 2.0 by the last days of the communist state.
North Korea was initially eager to copy the pro-natalist policies of its Big Brothers, China and Russia. The DPRK’s population decreased from 9.62 million in 1949 to 8.49 million in 1953, as millions died or moved to the South in the hectic war years, and Pyongyang was determined to compensate.
In a sense, it worked. By 1960, North Korea had a population of 10.79 million people, and by 1970, the number had further increased to 14.62 million. Addressing the Fifth Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) in 1970, Kim Il Sung said: “It’s good if our population increases to 20 million. It’s good if our population increases to 30 million.”
This sounded optimistic, much in line with the policy of previous decades. But the following sentence betrayed some worries — “The problem, however, is to feed and dress these people.” — and hinted at the coming change in population policy.
CLANDESTINE FAMILY PLANNING
In the early 1970s, North Korea made a U-turn and became one of the first communist countries to embrace family control. This happened well before China embraced the notorious “one-child policy” in 1979.
A number of factors probably drove the embrace of fertility reduction policies, but the single most important was likely South Korea.
Influenced by then-fashionable fears of a coming “population explosion,” South Korea began to implement a family planning program in the early 1960s. This program was quite successful: The country’s TFR was 6.5 in 1966 but had collapsed to 4.5 by 1977 and 2.8 by 1982.
At the time, South Korean media repeatedly asserted that a dramatic reduction of the fertility rate was the key to economic success. The propaganda appears to have impressed not only its intended audience in the South but North Korean decisionmakers as well.
DPRK census data indicates a dramatic decline in fertility starting from the early 1970s, and stories of older refugees who lived in North Korea in those days confirm that the government pursued such a policy.
Workplaces and organizations — including the WPK, Trade Union, Youth Union and Women’s Union — pressured North Koreans to limit the number of children they had and use contraception. Much like in South Korea at the time, the state mobilized doctors and nurses to lecture about contraception methods.
In a remarkable measure, the government unofficially raised the marriage age: In the 1970s, the Youth Union claimed that patriotic Korean men should marry at the age of 30, and women at 27. All the years of youth, according to the official explanation, should be dedicated to the motherland, party and leader.
North Korean officials also introduced a maternity leave system at an early stage. From the late 1970s, a mother would receive 150 days of maternity leave for her first child, 100 days for her second and no leave for any subsequent children.
TOO MUCH POLICY SUCCESS?
The family planning campaign continued until the mid-1990s and contributed to the decline of North Korea’s TFR. The indicator, as measured through different sources, fell from around 4.3 in 1970 to a modest 2.3 in 1990, the year North Korea’s population exceeded the 20 million mark.
Of course, the decline in fertility was not the result of family planning alone. North Korea, in spite of its poverty, was approaching what can be called a modern society in terms of values, gender relations, urbanization and schooling levels.
By the late 1950s, virtually all girls were attending at least primary school, and secondary education became universal by the 1970s. People moved to cities, attended schools and adopted modern values, albeit of the peculiar North Korean variety.
The period of family control lasted until the early 1990s, when North Korea’s population policy took another U-turn. Facing economic collapse, the government again began to officially extol the glories of childbearing.
In 1993, North Korea criminalized abortion, which had been legal for a while. The state also encouraged marriages at a younger age and dramatically increased propaganda about the wonders of big, happy families.
While official data states the population reached 25.8 million last year, there are growing suspicions that the DPRK falsified 2008 census data and that the population may be lower than it claims.
Indeed, the history of population control has taught us that while governments can drive fertility down if both determined and lucky, they are unlikely to achieve the reverse result — even if they spend a massive amount of money to do so.
Submission on Rights of Women & Girls in North Korea for the Special Rapporteur’s Report to the 52nd Human Rights Council Session 2023
Discrimination and Violence against Women and Girls
Despite claims by officials in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) that gender equality has been achieved, North Korean women and girls are subject to intense and pervasive human rights abuses including sexual and gender-based violence, widespread discrimination, and enforcement of rigid gender stereotypes.
Traditional Confucian patriarchal values remain deeply embedded in North Korea. Confucianism is an ethical and philosophical system that is strictly hierarchical and values social harmony. In such a society, a woman’s position in society is lower than a man’s and her reputation depends largely on maintaining an image of “sexual purity” before marriage and obeying the men in her family.
Discrimination against women and girls is accepted as an inevitable part of everyday life in North Korea. Stereotyped gender roles begin in childhood. Girls learn they are not equal to boys and cannot resist mistreatment and abuse, and that they should feel shame if they become targets of abuse by men, whether in the home or in public spaces. In interviews in Human Rights Watch’s 2018 report “You Cry at Night but Don’t Know Why,” North Korean students and teachers explained that in mixed gender classes boys were almost always made leaders and that male teachers usually made decisions in schools, even though the majority of teachers in the school were women. Social structures and conventions that discriminate against women are also reflected in socially enforced rules of interaction between girls and boys. As teenagers, girls are often asked to use an honorific form when speaking to boys, even though there is no reverse requirement. This practice continues through university, extending into the workplace, marriage, and family life. Lee Chun Seok, a female former schoolteacher from Ryanggang province who left North Korea in 2013, told Human Rights Watch: “Men are the sky and women are the earth. What men think and say are what matters. We must absolutely obey men, respect them, and treat them with honor.”
According to North Korea’s 2016 state party report submitted to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee), women had minimal representation in positions of influence within the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), comprising 10 percent of divisional directors in government bodies, 11.9 percent of judges and lawyers, 4.9 percent of diplomats, and 16.5 percent of officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the time of that report, there were no women in the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the WPK, the main policymaking mechanism in the country.
The number of women in the Central Committee has doubled between 2016 and 2019, with increased visibility in state-run media of female officials like Kim Yo Jong, Kim Kyong Hui, and Choe Son Hui. However, the increased involvement of women in leadership does not appear to have resulted in policy changes.
Domestic violence in North Korea is considered a “private matter” and cases of sexual harassment and violence, even in public, go virtually unreported. North Korean escapees have told Human Rights Watch that authorities do not consider violence against women to be a serious crime. Others have stated that the stigma surrounding the victims of sexual violence and harassment prevents women and girls from seeking redress. Survivors of sexual assault lack the language itself to describe what happened to them, an issue compounded by the lack of public sex education in the country. Cho Byul Me, a former smuggler from North Hamkyung province who left North Korea in 2014, explained that she sometimes had to run away from her house when her husband started beating her up, but had nowhere to go. “Eventually I’d just have to go back home and wait outside the door sometimes in the bitter cold, under the snow or the rain, until I’d think he had fallen asleep,” she said. “I had nowhere to go and I would have left him if I had anywhere to go.”
Notably, during North Korea’s CEDAW Committee review in 2016, one government official did not even seem to understand questions about “marital rape” or what the term meant, and asked the committee to explain it. The same official also claimed that punishments for superiors coercing women into sex should be much less than in cases of rape involving outright physical violence, because, the official claimed, there is less of an impact on victims.
According to the South Korean Ministry of Unification, 81 percent of North Korean escapees in 2019 were female, prior to the Covid-19 related border closure. This can partly be explained by the decreased scrutiny women face compared to men in North Korea, as men are required to go to state-run workplaces while many married women stay at home to care for the family. In addition, many North Korean women and girls are trafficked and sold to Chinese men or enter the sex industry in China. The Chinese trafficking markets are well connected with local Chinese authorities, who facilitate these practices. Still, the Chinese government routinely labels North Koreans as illegal “economic migrants” and forcibly repatriates them under a 1986 bilateral border protocol. The 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry report on the human rights situation in North Korea found that North Korean escapees who are forcibly repatriated face systematic torture, arbitrary detention, and sexual violence, including invasive body searches and forced abortions, that amount to crimes against humanity.
Human Rights Watch has heard many unconfirmed calls from the Pyongyang government to authorities in the border areas and in detention facilities ordering local officials to protect unspecified human rights of people in custody, However, Human Rights Watch is not aware of any new policies or legal reforms that address protections of rights of women and girls.
Women in the Markets
Prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, women were estimated to contribute more than 70 percent of the country’s household incomes. Because married women are not forced to go to official workplaces like their husbands, and single women are not universally conscripted into the military, North Korean women had more mobility to work in the informal markets (jangmadang). These markets increased trade with China and bolstered the economy after the collapse of the public distribution system during the famine in the late 1990s. Reports from before the pandemic estimated that women comprised roughly 80 percent of the market. The wages of North Koreans in official, state-approved ordinary workers’ roles are capped at pre-1990s prices, equivalent to an average of seven to nine kilograms of corn per month, which were eclipsed by market vendor earnings. Many North Korean women became the primary breadwinners of their families. Participation in the markets gave them stronger voices at home, increased their decision-making power about finances and children’s education, and improved their access to information about issues inside and outside of North Korea. Involvement in these informal markets was one and perhaps the only way that North Korean women enjoyed empowerment and autonomy in North Korea.
However, women leaving their homes to work in the markets also exposed them to increased gender-based discrimination. Female North Korean escapees told Human Rights Watch that the increased visibility of women in markets drew scrutiny from the authorities. North Korea’s vague laws and the possibility of technical illegality in nearly all market business activity created opportunities for guards or officers to harass or detain women in the markets, including by extracting bribes in the form of sexual demands. The 2014 Commission of Inquiry report found that “the male dominated state, agents who police the marketplace, inspectors on trains, and soldiers are increasingly committing acts of sexual assault on women in public spaces.” This was described as “the male dominated state preying on the increasingly female-dominated market.”
Since 2020, the excessive and unnecessary measures that the North Korean government has ostensibly implemented to quell the spread of Covid-19 have disproportionately impacted women and girls. These measures, including “buffer zones” on the borders with China and Russia and orders given to border guards, limitations on domestic travel, trade, and product distribution, and increased ideological campaigns, have blocked virtually all movement between North Korea and China, both commercial and otherwise. These overbroad measures have subjected North Koreans to food and medicine shortages, plunging the country into renewed economic hardship and austerity. These new regulations also appear to be a means by the government to return to the strict economic controls and social values of decades past, when the government more tightly controlled its northern border, the imports and distribution of products, and all access to information.
The measures disproportionately affect North Korean women and their livelihoods by cutting them out of many of the market activities they had been engaged in prior to the pandemic and reversing many of the socioeconomic gains they had obtained.
Recommendations
Human Rights Watch urges the Special Rapporteur to:
- Request a visit to North Korea to assess the rights situation of women and girls, including those in custody.
- Urge the government to relax Covid-related border and import restrictions, citing their disparate impact on women’s rights.
- Urge the government to launch public interest and awareness campaigns, especially in schools, to promote gender equality and combat discriminatory attitudes and policies that contribute to subordination of women and girls in society and within the family.
- Request the government launch comprehensive sexuality education programs for children and adults that are age-appropriate, medically and scientifically accurate, and inclusive of all students.
- Urge the government to provide appropriate criminal penalties for all forms of gender-based violence, including marital rape, establish safe reporting systems for victims, and ensure that the authorities investigate and prosecute cases of gender-based violence with a survivor-centered approach. This includes training the relevant authorities such as agents and inspectors about gender-based violence and developing protocols for those who will respond to these cases.
- Urge the government to develop social services for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, including counseling and medical care, accessible to all women and girls who need it.
- Urge the government to ensure that survivors of gender-based violence can access and petition courts for restraining or protection orders.
- Urge the government to ensure that authorities dealing with women who have been forcibly repatriated do not punish them.
- Urge the government to end all violations of reproductive rights, including all forced or coerced medical examinations or procedures. The authorities should ensure that women who have been trafficked or suffered gender-based violations have access to support and services.
Human Rights Watch urges the Special Rapporteur to call on concerned governments to:
- Mark and commemorate the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Commission of Inquiry on North Korea in March 2023 through events and initiatives.
- Urge UN Security Council member states and other governments to use the opportunity of the 10th anniversary of the Commission of Inquiry to recommit on addressing human rights in North Korea, and organize a formal session, open to the public and media, to discuss the situation of human rights in North Korea, including the rights of women and girls.
- Call on Security Council members and other governments to mainstream discussion of human rights in all discussions regarding North Korea, including weapons proliferation, aid, economy, or culture.
- Call on Human Rights Council member states to renew and strengthen the mandate of the accountability experts to consolidate and analyze evidence of the most serious international crimes, including violations against women and girls, and prepare files in view of cooperating, sharing, and expediting fair and independent criminal proceedings in national and international courts that have or may have in the future jurisdiction over these crimes.
- Encourage Human Rights Council member states and other governments, including Albania, Argentina, Ecuador, EU, Ghana, Japan, Lichtenstein, Marshall Islands, Montenegro, Republic of Korea, and the United States, to express support for the Officer of the High Commissioner for Human Rights accountability mandate and encourage the office to advance its work towards accountability for rights violations in North Korea.
North Korea wants women to bear children for the motherland. They aren’t. | NK News
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