When your body belongs to the state: Girls in North Korea are told that a man’s touch can get them pregnant while those who ask about sex are considered a moral and political threat to society

In North Korea, there is no discussion about sex, reproduction or the human body. Jieun Baek discovers how this leads to disease and teenage pregnancy

GROWING UP IN the North Korean border city of Hyesan, Lee Hyeon and her friends believed that if a girl merely touched a man’s hand she would become pregnant.

Lee Myn, who was raised in a politically powerful family in Hamheung, the country’s second largest city, was no more knowledgable.

She first learned about human reproduction during her initial year living in South Korea as an 18-year-old defector.

Lee Hyeon, now 34, and Lee Myn, 30, come from a society that does not offer sex education at school and tightly restricts the flow of information elsewhere. While anecdotes such as these might seem charmingly naive, they have very negative consequences.

Lee Myn says that when she started menstruating, she thought she was dying. Most of her female friends came to the same conclusion.

Within this environment, it’s no surprise that sexually transmitted infections spread. This is particularly a problem for those who have pre-marital or extra-marital affairs. The combination of the absence of sex education, a social taboo placed on such behaviour and extremely under-resourced hospitals leads to people hiding, unintentionally spreading and not properly treating STIs. People who think they have some type of illness due to “sexually deviant” behaviour will generally be too ashamed even to seek medical treatment.

Then there’s pregnancy. An unintended pregnancy out of wedlock is an issue that brings collective shame on a woman’s family. Since the signs of pregnancy are not spoken of, women often don’t know they are pregnant until they are quite far along. If still at school, the girl is usually expelled and left to handle her “shame” in private. Upon a quiet request, the neighbourhood’s designated midwife will come to her home and carry out an abortion. In the rare instances where a child is carried to term outside marriage, the baby will be given away for adoption. It is near impossible to raise a child as a single mother.

There are several reasons why sex education might be non-existent in North Korea. It may be a hangover of the country’s conservative Confucian history, a history shared with its southern counterpart prior to the peninsula’s division. Until recently, South Korea was also extremely socially conservative, with premarital sex or any subject pertaining to adult bodies considered either wholly taboo or intensely awkward at best.

But North Koreans also live in a society shrouded in secrecy and are shielded from information not state approved. People are not allowed to ask for such things to be included on the curriculum as such a request would be interpreted as criticism of the state’s education. Nor are they permitted to air any grievances associated with the consequences of not having proper, even minimal, sex education. There is absolutely no physical or political space for people to voice any discontent with their regime, or any extension of it, so sex education remains strictly off limits.

Students at a teacher training college in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 2018

CREDIT: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

Lee Myn told Index that young adults engaging in these taboo behaviours, or who talk about them, are deemed “too free-spirited”, “independent” and “wild”, which are thinly veiled descriptions of those thought to pose moral and political threats to society.

She said: “If someone is so free with his body, then he can easily gain confidence to break the law, and be a danger in the eyes of the regime.”

Indeed, the lack of sex education is as much a political issue as a personal one. Ultimately, a North Korean citizen’s body belongs to the state. Citizens are not allowed to travel beyond their towns without the authorities’ permission. International travel requires the regime’s explicit permission and attempts to leave the nation without such permission is punishable by death.

That most North Koreans live, work and die in their home towns adds another dimension holding back the flow of information. Lee Hyeon’s younger brother, Lee Seong-min, also a defector, told Index that questions of puberty, reproduction and dating were made more uncomfortable because the only people they could talk to were those they had grown up with.

“You know your peers in your home town since childhood, the same people you studied with and played with outside. Consequently, such questions and curiosities are simply not expressed. Too embarrassing.”

Lee Seong-min said that when he and his classmates started getting acne and the boys’ voices started sounding different, he was very confused. There was no teacher to turn to and parents did not discuss these topics with their children.

In the late-1990s, France and several other countries shipped their rubbish to North Korea and paid them to recycle it. Lee Seong-min remembers “treasure-hunting” through mountains of waste and trying to make sense of the cassette tapes, ripped clothes and sweet wrappers. He also recalls pulling out what he thought were balloons, blowing them up and playing with them with his friends. They would tie strings to the balloons and run around the streets or toss them in the air like light volleyballs. He now realises that these “balloons” were used condoms.

“How gross! But no one knew what these were. Not even the adults!” he said.

Will the situation improve? There are positive signs that it might. The wives of the first two North Korean leaders were never in the public eye. Portraying the leader as the country’s father, and not the father of his immediate family, was part of constructing an image that he was living the life of highest sacrifice for the nation’s citizens. This public relations strategy seems to have changed with President Kim Jong-un. His wife, Ri Sol-ju, is often seen in public, lovingly holding her husband’s arm, and is present at important meetings. This may be a signal from the top that the role of women in North Korean society is changing.

Indeed, there is plenty to suggest women are gaining more of a voice in North Korean society. Since the 1990s, North Koreans have turned to small private markets to sustain themselves. While husbands would typically go to work, housewives ran these private markets. This enabled many women to bring in supplementary, and at times primary, income to their households, and from there to gain more leverage and agency.

This might help women one day to access practical and useful information on health and reproduction.

Then there is the fact that, despite the government’s greatest efforts, information from the outside world does make its way into North Korea. USBs and DVDs are smuggled across the border, offering an insight into the lives of those outside the country, including their personal lives. North Koreans have reported watching Chinese and Russian movies as well as Titanic, James Bond and US soap operas, including Desperate Housewives. South Korean television dramas that have romantic scenes, though not necessarily explicitly sexual ones, are also viewed.

“North Koreans are living in what South Korea was in the 1970s; conservative, traditional and patriarchal. But North Koreans learn and adapt very quickly,” said Lee Myn.

“I defected to South Korea and learned how to live in a democracy in a short period of time. Whether it’s sex education, or something else, we can learn, adapt and thrive.”