51 distribution system vis-à-vis its residents. On the other hand, from a human rights perspective, the ‘routinization of economic plight’ grants the state room for intervening in livelihood activities centring on markets through forms of control, physical violence, and exploitation. Thus, in the course of state interventions, the patterns, scale, and modes of human rights violations are diversifying and are becoming structuralized. As women, in particular, have been at the centre of market-related livelihood activities, it can be asserted that the inadequacy of the human rights situation of women has been turned into a structural feature over the long-term. This configuration of human rights violations can be viewed as having been constructed through the interweaving of human rights violations retained from the past within an authoritarian, oppressive, and discriminatory societal structure and human rights violations emerging with regard to market-orientated livelihood activities. From this point of view and at this point in time more than ever before, we need to closely observe and analyze how the marketization in North Korea impacts on the human rights environment. The seriousness of the problem stems from the fact that this structuralization of human rights violations involves regular and widespread violence, exploitation, and victimization of North Korean women. Throughout the ‘routinization of economic plight’ North Korean women have been exposed to the existing patriarchal order centring on men and the use of authoritarian power, to a discriminatory order of social stratification, and within it, to an intermediate structure of discrimination and exploitation as they are faced with a situation in which they have to bear the responsibility for securing their livelihoods through markets. Therefore, although various reasons for the continuously high proportion of women amongst North Korean refugees can be contemplated, it is important to specifically look into the fact that the human rights situation faced by North Korean women has been structuralized in a more exploitative and repressive form after the economic crisis of the 1990s.