66 party to the promotion of officials, all this then becomes impossible. (Mun Gyeongsun, 2009, 2-7) With regard to residents of cities, people have not been able to work and receive wages – although they were placed in jobs – since the mid-1990s because factories and state-run enterprises ceased operation; since that time, a situation has persisted in which the state in fact lacked the capability to grant the right to work. In this situation young women have become a target of human traffickers or sex traffickers who move back and forth between North Korea and China, and there have been many cases in which women were sold to the latter (Go Yeongsun, 2009, 4-5); this development still continues today. Amid circumstances in which women, in fact, are not given the right to work, these women’s lives are sacrificed and sold off, lured by the prospect of securing their families survival. 3) Living off women’s livelihood activities: the state and men In North Korea, there has traditionally been a strong tendency to regard trading as ‘something that makes your face blush’, i.e. as work generally considered shameful or lowly (Go Yeongsun, 2009, 4-5). When trading became an important means of livelihood activities in the 1990s, this negative evaluation has reportedly lessened; nevertheless, it still persists within the patriarchal social order. The patriarchal North Korean society displays a strong tendency to think of fields of activity for men and women as radically differentiated and separate: the public world of occupations as belonging to men, the private sphere such as the family and the marketplace as belonging to women. Men’s inclination to settle in the patriarchal male sphere emerged even more clearly when men no longer went to work due to the economic crisis and when markets sprung up in the years following the 1990s. Since trading was perceived as damaging men’s ‘honour’, as something shameful, livelihood activities involving trading have been entirely left to women. Thus, women can be said to be forced – against their will (socially) – into a very inadequate work environment due to this androcentric occupational hierarchy and family structure. Certainly, the intensity of such livelihood