Sylvia Yu Friedman

South China Morning Post — Shahid Sandhu's sense of loss and anxiety from his loveless marriage knows no bounds. But his is more than a bad connection. From the time he left Pakistan to join his new wife overseas four years ago, she, her brothers and her parents have been controlling his every move.

South China Morning Post — In the 12 months leading up to Wednesday's 80th anniversary of the start of the Nanking massacre, a researcher in the city discovered two previously unknown Chinese survivors of forced sexual slavery organised by the Japanese military.

South China Morning Post — The great famine that struck North Korea during the 1990s triggered a mass exodus from the reclusive country. An untold number of people have since fled to China and more than 30,000 have defected...

South China Morning Post — It is an open secret that a significant number of North Korean labourers work in China and Russia in border cities, especially in Siberia. But owing to minimal record-keeping, little is known about...

South China Morning Post — A Pakistani man claiming he was deprived of food and forced to work as a "slave husband" after he immigrated to Hong Kong is speaking out to prevent others from living his heartbreaking story....

National Observer — A slender girl with a solemn demeanour, Tahera was only nine when a trafficker came to her parents in the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazar in southern Bangladesh. The trafficker promised her parents a lot of money if Tahera could work as a domestic worker for a Bangladesh family.

South China Morning Post — Charles Ryu, now living in the United States, spent nine months in a labour camp in his teens after his first attempt to flee the reclusive state

South China Morning Post — Lia ran away from home more than a decade ago, fleeing three elder half-brothers whose physical and emotional abuse had made a misery of her life in Surabaya, Indonesia. So when she found an employment agency in Jakarta that specialised in recruiting women for jobs abroad, she had little to lose.

South China Morning Post — China has made life dangerous for North Korean refugees living in the country amid the escalating nuclear weapons crisis, NGO's leader says

South China Morning Post — Jean never knew how long it would take to repay her debt. All she knew was that doing so was destroying her. To meet the never-ending demands of her "agent" she would sell her body up to three times a night to men she met at the same Hong Kong bar where, on paper, she was employed as a "domestic helper".

Reuters — HONG KONG (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Pimp turned do-gooder Kaushic Biswas has swapped the brothel for the kitchen and is now teaching the sort of women he once exploited how to cook their way out of sex trafficking.

South China Morning Post — Mary Zardilla looked like she had it all. It was 1986, the heyday of Hong Kong hedonism and she had spent the past decade climbing the greasy pole of the entertainment business to its gaudy, gold-plated zenith - the self-appointed greatest night club of them all, Club Bboss.

South China Morning Post — Sylvia Yu Friedman says an unsatisfactory Korea-Japan deal on resolving the painful past must be renegotiated - this time with the participation of all involved - so that those suffering can finally find closure

Sojourners Magazine — EVERY TUESDAY, AI JIN and two other young women from one of China's underground urban Christian churches get together to pray-then walk the streets of a mafia-run red light district to tell girls as young as 13 who work in brothels that they can get out of prostitution.

Reuters — HONG KONG (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When Siti was promised a high salary for working as a maid overseas, her parents urged her to leave their rural home in Indonesia's rugged East Java province. There was only one problem - Siti was 14.

The Globe and Mail — Sylvia Yu Friedman is the author of Silenced No More: Voices of Comfort Women In 1970, Willy Brandt, the late German chancellor, dropped to his knees spontaneously in front of a memorial as a sign of repentance before survivors of the Holocaust in Poland. Many said they were healed by his moving gesture.

Thomson Reuters Foundation — Clients pay up to $650 for sex with Kat, but the money goes to her pimp. Without money, she cannot escape or fly home, and besides, her traffickers know where her family lives.

The Globe and Mail — COMFORT WOMEN: We pursue Nazis, but do little about Japan's wartime atrocities, says filmmaker SYLVIA YU This week hundreds of protesters marched outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul to protest Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit to a war shrine, and to express their dismay over the Japanese government's approval of school history texts that gloss over Japan's record in the Second World War. The protesters included elderly women, the last survivors of the 200,000 Koreans who were forced to be sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army more than half a century ago.

CBC.ca — CBC News - Viewpoint: Sylvia Yu For 63 years, Mr. Chen Chong Wen has had to change the bandages on his leg daily. His home-style remedy for his oozing wound is to use a playing card to stop the flow. “There’s no medicine for this,” he said, “it hurts very much and it itches.” The stench of rotting flesh is overwhelming as he shows his leg. His open sore is terrible-looking and has a tofu-like texture. He feels he’s been a burden to his family because they have to take care of him. “It’s my bad luck,” he says and looks down at the ground. Chen was infected with “rotten leg disease,” it’s also known as glanders, as he was running away from the Japanese Imperial Army in Zhejiang province in 1942. His mother was also infected. And not too long after her heel rotted off, she died in terrible pain. At the time he didn’t know why he had met such misfortune, but Chen now knows that he was a victim of biological warfare, inflicted by the Japanese military during an invasion of China. Original url on CBC of my Viewpoint columns has been archived on this website: http://web.archive.org/web/20051023175359/http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_yu/20050608.html Full column at this website: https://sylviayufriedman.com/2012/02/26/the-forgotten-victims-of-japanese-biological-warfare-in-china/

TVB — How and why do people abuse their domestic helpers? How does the law exacerbate the abuse? Hong Kong has come under the international spotlight for torturing foreign domestic workers. Many locals say these are isolated cases, abhorrent nevertheless. Original link on TVB Pearl (cannot view the program - see YouTube link below): http://programme.tvb.com/news/pearlreport/episode/20140303

CNN International — The agreement states the Japanese government will offer a one-time final apology and to pay 1 billion yen ($8.3m) to provide care for victims through a foundation. While there are those who argue that this is a breakthrough for the comfort women movement, the longest running activist movement on sex slavery in modern history, this agreement only deals with one country -- the reconciliation between Japan and South Korea.

thefinancialexpress.com.bd — Uddin thought he was tapping into a financial lifeline for his future and his family back in Bangladesh when he migrated to Singapore for construction work. He was promised a job as a construction site engineer that would pay a higher salary than what he was making in Bangladesh.

RMG Times — Sylvia Yu: Like so many Bangladeshi young men with limited work options in their villages, Uddin felt an urgency to go abroad for work in search of a better, more prosperous life for himself and his family. But instead of tapping into a financial lifeline, he unwittingly found himself mired in debt bondage and deception and ...