Camptown Justice

South Korean Women's Historic Lawsuit

Illustration by John Lamberger & Connor JL Moore

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Park Young-ja was 15 when she went to a job placement agency seeking work. She was placed in a coffee shop and sold for 15,000 Won. She tried to escape after experiencing sexual abuse and was sold again—this time to bars in the military camptowns of Dongducheon and later Uijeongbu. 

Debt made leaving impossible. Bar or club owners recorded the cost of a woman's purchase price, housing, food, and clothing—this all became money she owed them. These manufactured debts compounded faster than they could ever be repaid, trapping women inside a system that considered their captivity a business contract.

Every week, camp authorities required her to submit to STD testing. When she tested positive, she was forcibly detained in a medical detention center and injected with penicillin. If she was caught without her health card during a random inspection, she was detained without any testing at all. 

Park spent 24 years in the camptown system. In 2014, she was one of 122 women who sued the South Korean government. She testified: “We were abandoned in this

country where we were born. In the kijich’ons [US military camptowns], we were only subjected to violence and extortion. Nobody cared about us.”

In 2022, South Korea's Supreme Court ruled that the government had mediated, aided, and abetted an illegal sex trade, violating the government’s duty to protect its citizens. The court found that survivors had a right to compensation. This ruling was historic, but the next step for these survivors was US accountability.

GI Heaven

The camptown system trapped as many as one million South Korean women and girls across five decades—a state-sanctioned sex trade built into the infrastructure of the US-South Korean alliance. The system was bureaucratized: government-managed, medically surveilled, and coordinated with US military priorities. American soldiers called the strip of camptowns stretching from the DMZ down to Seoul “GI Heaven.” For these girls, the reality was the opposite. 

This isn't simply a story of interpersonal violence or wartime chaos. It implicates actors whom the dominant historical narrative treats as liberators, which is part of why the camptowns remain largely absent from international memory. While many may be aware of the Japanese “comfort women,” the camptown system has no obvious villain for Western audiences. The perpetrators are allies, the infrastructure was built under the banner of collective security, and the violence was administered through bureaucratic procedure. It is harder to assign blame or seek accountability when the perpetrators are also your protectors.

Archival photographs of U.S. military camptowns in South Korea during the Cold War era. From left: Kuwabara Shisei, Untitled (at P’aju), 1965, from Kankoku gen’ei (San’ichi Shobō, 1986); Kuwabara Shisei, photograph from Kankoku gen’ei, c. 1960s—both reproduced in Ji Hye Han, “Photographs of the U.S. Military Base in Cold War Korea,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (APJJF), 2024; and a camptown near a U.S. military base in South Korea, c. 1960s, reproduced in “Supreme Court Orders Reparations for Sex Workers Serving U.S. Military,” Monthly Review Online (MR Online), 2022. Images reproduced for commentary and educational purposes; all rights remain with the original copyright holders.

In the 1960s, rates of STIs among American soldiers in South Korea were “far above the norm for American military installations in Japan and Europe.” In response, the South Korean and US governments jointly launched a “cleanup” campaign to control the spread of STIs. This campaign led to the creation of a detention facility, colloquially called the “Monkey House” in Dongducheon, where women suspected of carrying STIs were involuntarily held.

US military personnel conducted random inspections at clubs, rounding up women without valid registration or VD test cards. Women wore numbered badges or name tags at the clubs, and the US military kept photo files of women at base clinics to help infected soldiers identify contacts. Failure to produce a card—or a positive test result—meant forced detention.

Once detained, these women were forcibly examined and injected with penicillin, often administered by US military medics in doses higher than Korean physicians would typically prescribe, without adequate research into side effects. According to survivors, many women received overdoses; some died. 

The 2022 South Korean Supreme Court ruling upheld the finding that these detentions violated human rights. This ruling established the legal and moral groundwork for asking what the Korean government's security partner owes.

The New Lawsuit: How it Works, Why it's Complicated

In 2025, survivors of the camptown system filed a new suit against the South Korean Justice Ministry. They are seeking 10 million won (roughly $7,200) per plaintiff, but more than that, they are seeking a formal apology and official acknowledgement of US complicity. The South Korean government is the named defendant, but the US military is the real target.

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which governs the legal status of US military personnel in South Korea, contains no mechanism for naming the US military as an institutional defendant in Korean civil courts. Survivors cannot sue the US government directly for what was done to them. SOFA, in this sense, functions as a built-in accountability gap—a legal architecture designed to insulate US military conduct from host-nation redress. The South Korean Justice Ministry is serving as a defendant by proxy.

This isn't the first time SOFA has blocked Korean civilians from seeking justice against US military conduct. In 2002, two US soldiers driving an armored vehicle killed two 14-year-old girls, Shin Hyo-sun and Shim Mi-seon. SOFA required the soldiers to be tried in American military courts. Both were acquitted. The same legal architecture that shielded those soldiers is what prevents the survivors of US camptowns from naming their actual defendant.

This new lawsuit seeks something the US has never offered: accountability. The plaintiffs want the US to admit it was directly involved in a state-sponsored sex trade, that American medics administered dangerous doses of penicillin to detained women, and that US military personnel operated and benefited from a system of gendered violence. As one plaintiff shared, “Our story is not a history of shame. Our story is a cry for truth. We are victims. We are human beings. We will fight to the very end.”

Madalyn Jane Shircliff is an M.A. candidate in International Security from the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs.

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