Experts attend a forum held in Seoul, Tuesday, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Korea's anti-prostitution law. Korea Times photo by Jung Min-ho

Foreign women are among the new main targets of Korean sex traffickers as they search for more vulnerable victims considered to pose a reduced legal risk for them, according to experts.

At Tuesday's forum held to mark the 20th anniversary of the country's anti-prostitution law, experts called on policymakers to take measures to better protect foreign women, the disabled and others vulnerable to sex traffickers.

Reliable data on how many foreign women are involved in the sex trade is hard to come by. But according to an analysis on judicial precedents, foreign women were involved in more than 33 percent of all sex trade cases brought to court in 2022, a jump from 24.4 percent in 2019. Thai women accounted for most of the foreign women's cases in 2022, it showed.

“As it has become more difficult for sex traffickers to find targets amid growing awareness of the illegality and human rights violations in regard to the sex trade, they increasingly target foreign women, minors and those with intellectual or mental disabilities,” said Jang Lim Da-hye, a researcher at the Korean Institute of Criminology and Justice, a think tank.

Sex traffickers and pimps target non-Korean women for many reasons. The language barrier and the ways such cases are typically investigated here are among the obvious reasons.

Under the law, police and the prosecution should protect the victims of sex trafficking while investigating and indicting women who chose to do sex work for economic reasons. But drawing a clear line between the two groups has proven to be extremely challenging, according to the experts. And for cases involving foreign women, it has been even more so.

That's largely because Korean investigators focus chiefly on whether the people in question are subject to indictment, instead of figuring out whether they were forced to do such work — a process that would take extra effort and time.

Members of women's rights group hold a rally in Seoul, Monday, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Korea's anti-prostitution law. Yonhap

“Instead of asking in-depth questions to figure out how the woman in question ended up in the sex trade, interpreters for police asked questions such as, ‘Did you come knowing what your job would be here?' If the person says, ‘Yes,' they assume that the person agreed to do sex work, according to rights activists,” said Lee Mi-jung, a researcher at the Korean Women's Development Institute, a think tank.

Experts at the event said there should be systematic reforms to better protect the victims of sex trafficking. And to achieve this, policymakers should come up with better ways to figure out who should be regarded as victims first, they said. A successful reform may require the revision of the current law, they added.

Experts said the anti-prostitution law has accomplished some of its objectives over the past 20 years. Most people now know that the sex trade is a criminal offense; the highly visible red-light districts that once dotted many of Korea's major cities have been mostly tamed.

But despite these successes, the sex trade continues to flourish online in ways that require fresh approaches.

As the country marked the 20th anniversary of the anti-prostitution law on Monday, seven groups representing women's rights issued a joint statement calling for lawmakers to revise the current law to acknowledge the exploitative nature of sex trafficking and to recognize all sex workers as victims, not criminals.