47 IV. The human rights situation of women in North Korea 1. Societal change and the human rights environment in North Korea in the 1990s Since the 1990s, North Korean society has been undergoing social changes on various levels. In a country centred on a system of distributions, the breakdown of this redistribution system can be considered as probably the main driving force for fundamental changes in the forms and substance of life, due to the latter’s dependence on the state. Such transformations of life forms and contents manifest themselves in the economic life which revolves around livelihood activities, in the working and employment life which previously took place primarily in factories and farms, in the political life which was structuralized by ideological learning and education, and in the cultural life which was practised with a strong focus on official organizations and groups, etc.; i.e. changes materialize on both the level of environment and the level of consciousness. These changes originate in structural problems inherent in the North Korean political and economic system, as well as in the ‘experiential truth’ that people learnt amid social and economic changes in which the ‘Gonanui Haenggun’ (the ‘March of Tribulation’), i.e. both experiences of and a daily life with severe famines, was embedded. The rise of market-dependent livelihood activities, the revitalisation of official and unofficial social networks and information exchange, a deepening of the divide between haves and have-nots and increasing social stratification, the disintegration of families and changes in family structure, the qualitative decline of educational services and their polarisation, change of inter-generational values, the increase in ‘illegal’ population movements and livelihood activities, etc., are all developments related to peoples’ hardship and difficulties in everyday life and are, in particular, directly connected to the human rights environment of women.