Military Prostitution in Asia and the United States

Abstract

Kyung Richards spent seven years in a North Carolina prison on a murder charge. She grew up in an economically devastated region in rural Korea. As a teenager, she was raped. Not long after that incident, and after the death of her father, she began working in a bar close to a U.S. military base. Kyung began a relationship with a U.S. serviceman while still in her teens. They married and came to the United States, but her husband, who was an addict, became abusive and Kyung found herself on her own. Later she became involved with another man, also a former serviceman and also an addict who also became very abusive; and, after several years Kyung moved herself and her two young children to a motel. She found work at a local bar, but unable to afford child care, she left her children alone in the motel with the television on while she went to work. One day Kyung came home to find one of her children dead: Apparently her two-year-old son had tried to use a drawer in the bureau as a step in an attempt to reach the television, and both bureau and television fell on top of him. She called someone she knew, who advised her to call the police. Unaware of investigatory proceedings, she tidied up the motel room before police arrived; she was afraid that if the police saw an untidy room, they would take away her other child.