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According to the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report,  Mongolian trafficking victims have been found in a growing number of countries as far reaching as Germany, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and more. And an increasing cohort of Mongolian women are entering into arranged marriages with foreigners – mostly South Koreans – but end up in situations of involuntary servitude.

That leaves trafficking victims like Nomin vulnerable. Since returning to Mongolia from her Korean nightmare, she worked briefly on a pig farm and has now returned to Ulan Bator to look for employment. She remains without a job, but was offered one — at a Korean hostess bar.

For now, she’s staying with relatives in a poor neighborhood.

“In the future I hope to enter university and after graduation I can find a normal job,” she says. “But I don’t know. It’s difficult to find a normal job.”

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What do Korean guys think of Mongolian girls? It’s mostly low class Korean men who can’t marry Korean women who choose to marry Mongolian women. This is because they don’t have enough money or too little education to impress Korean women. Mongolia is very poor so some Mongolian women become mail-order brides and go to South Korea to find a husband. This is the same with Vietnamese women in South Korea but Vietnamese women are the most popular brides because they are Confucian and more gentle. I also know some Mongolian women become prostitutes in South Korea.

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A native mongolian claimed：i started to hear more about Korea since 2000. We don’t have our own TV series, only movies. So TV’s always showed foreign soup operas. Early 90s- Japanese and Venezuelan series were very popular. Late 90s-chinese wuxia series were on every channel. But then 2000 came and Korean dramas started to air everywhere. At first it was weird and foreign but eventually everyone started to adapt ,at the same time many Mongolians started to visit and work in Korea. They became familiar with Korean food and culture and brought them into Mongolia. Also many Koreans came to Mongolia. They opened Christian churches in Mongolia. Today almost all Christian churches in Mongolia are operated by Koreans. I think most of them are actually cults,Shincheonji sect and Unification Church e.t.c. They have a very bad reputation here so many Mongolians think that Christianity is a very bizarre religion. Other than churches there are many Korean coffee shop chain and supermarkets on the streets.

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Mongolians accused South Korean tourists of spawning a culture of buying sex in their country. In 2002, a South Korean opened the first karaoke bar in Mongolia’s capital city of Ulan Bator and most karaoke bars in Mongolia are owned by South Koreans. The number of karaoke bars in Mongolia has increased to include some 50 bars.Locals said that it was Koreans who created the prostitution culture in Mongolia.

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To avoid the crackdown, prostitution has spread to horseback-riding schools, massage parlours and others. An official at a Mongolian horseback-riding school, which is only identified by the letter “G” and is located an hour’s drive from the city center, said, “When (men who are here as sex tourists) arrive at the airport, they are escorted here. Local women arrive here in a different van. When they move off to the grassland, (the women) are accompanied by the men.” The increase in sex tourism by South Korean male visitors has been a source of rising anti-Korean sentiment among Mongolians, according to South Korean nationals in the country. A 38-year-old South Korean national, who is only identified by the surname Lee and has lived in Mongolia for three years, said the number of assault cases against Korean people is on the rise. A 42-year-old local tour guide, who is only identified as Temuchin, said, “Anti-Korean sentiment is high because (Korean men) buy sex from (local) women.”

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Mongolia for sex

ULAN BATOR, Mongolia – Nomin wanted to go to college.

Three years ago, unable to afford tuition in the Mongolian capital, the native of remote Zavkhan province spotted an ad in a newspaper advertising a scholarship to study in Korea — no tuition, no living costs. All that was required was a high school diploma and a passport.

She handed over her documents to a Mongolian couple supposedly working for the university, and within weeks Nomin was on an airplane bound for Seoul with two other young women.

“When we arrived the couple told us it’s not a good time to enter university. They told us we had to work in a nightclub until the semester starts,” says Nomin (not her real name), now 25, in a near whisper during an interview in an Ulan Bator parking lot. “Everybody was speaking Korean. We were wondering what was going on.”

The girls were taken to Jeju Island, locked in a small apartment, beaten and forced to prostitute themselves in a local hostess bar. Three months later, with the help of a Mongolian businessman she met at the club, Nomin escaped through a bathroom window and made her way to Seoul and eventually back to Mongolia. Her family still doesn’t know what really happened to her.