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37 K im Yeo-ni was at work when the police forced their way in and took pictures of her naked. When she tried to put her dress on, they removed it. For five minutes, she sat uncovered on a bed while an officer photo- graphed her, the male customer she was with and the room they were in. As the walls were ripped apart in a search for emergency exits, she struggled with an officer after she tried to swallow the condom she had used with the customer. She was taken to the police station, where she was questioned and made to give a statement about her work. A few days later, she re- ceived an 800,000 won fine for breaking the law. Kim is a sex worker, an illegal profession in South Korea. Violent epi- sodes like this, she says, are a common occurrence in parts of Korea’s sex industry. “Massage salons get a lot of strong (police) intervention,” she says. “Because the condoms are evidence, we swallow them when the police barge in, but the police try to make us vomit them back up by strangling us or putting their fingers down our throats.” Last November, a sex worker in South Gyeongsang Province died when trying to escape from an undercover police officer who caught her working. Rather than face prosecution, she jumped from the sixth floor of the building she was in. Crackdowns, workplace violence and exploitation, and the fear of stigmatization make sex work dangerous. While statistics on violence against sex workers in Korea are lacking, Kim says tha t the govern- ment’s ongoing battle to eradicate the industry is making the situation worse. The biggest change she has witnessed in her seven years as a sex worker, she says, is the increase in crackdowns since the in- cumbent Park Geun-hye administration took office in 2013. “During Lee (Myung-bak)’s presidency there were almost no crackdowns. But when Park became president, the crackdowns got heavy right away,” she says. “The work environment is getting worse. It’s becoming more underground and more dangerous.” Despite the government’s efforts to stifle it, Korea’s sex industry is thriving. Harsh penalties for the sellers of sex were rarely enforced until 2004, when new laws intensified crackdowns on the industry and penalized both the buyers and sellers of sex in a bid to eradicate pros- titution and human trafficking for sexual exploitation. But Kim is part of a movement of sex workers who entered the industry on their own conviction and protest the laws that they say threaten their livelihoods and put them in danger. They seek to create an environment where they can practice their trade without fear of violence or prosecution when asking for help in an emergency. Kim works to change the mis- conceptions people have about sex workers so they can be safe in their workplace. “A lot of the times when sex workers are victimized by violence, they are treated as suspects,” she says. “Society doesn’t think of us as victims of a crime.” ‘I thought the reason people te nd to have a negative perception ab out the sex industry is because this in dustry is very secretive. so I wanted to show what it looks like on the inside.’ Kim Yeo-ni, sex worker and activist, Giant Girls Network for Sex Workers’ Rights