85 description shows, “When I settled in China I went around working as a care mother in families, but living like this was also very troublesome because I didn’t have a citizenship. When I go somewhere and work, because I don’t know Chinese, again the question comes up whether I’m a North Korean, the police station makes a phone call to my workplace [to inquire] whether I’m a North Korean. Then you have to leave that workplace.” (Kim Jinsun, 2009, 1-4), these movements are not prompted by one’s own choice but always by others. There are also cases in which earnings from work were claimed by people abusing the circumstances of North Korean refugee women under the pretext of collecting ‘penalties’. Kim Yeonghui (2009, 1-5) had acquired the skills of producing liquor in North Korea; after she came to China she ran a liquor factory in the suburbs of a Chinese city for almost 9 years. However, “because I was from North Korea, all the time people came from the police stations in the neighbourhood, smashing things up regularly, demanding that we pay the penalty. If we don’t pay they are going to return us to North Korea, [they said]. Because we die if they send us back, that’s why my husband [had to pay] the penalty of 2000 Yuan every day.” In China, North Korean refugee women had no means to demand their right to work and – due to the fact that they were forced to move frequently, that they could send remittances home only in obscure ways, and that they could uphold only insecure links with their families, i.e. due to their condition as North Korean refugee women – experienced their own psychological and physical destruction. 4) Stripped of human rights by ‘brokers’ abusing women’s status as illegal residents From North Korean refugee women’s departure from North Korea, during their sojourn in China, until their arrival in South Korea via third countries, the person who facilitates women’s movements and operates as a mediator is the ‘broker’. When these women finally enter South Korea, they undergo a 2 month-long education at Hanawon; and the first persons who ‘receive’ North Korean refugee women on their