Trafficking women for sexual abuse has been a serious concern worldwide, particularly over the last two decades. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated that illicit profits of human trafficking may be as high as $32 billion. However, the international media community has scarcely focused on North Korean women defectors and victims of human trafficking, despite the severity of the issue. More than two million North Koreans, predominantly women, have crossed borders to enter China from starvation. Among those women migrants, about 80% to 90% of them were abducted by traffickers at the border between North Korea and China, and the traffickers sold them to the Chinese sex industry or Chinese men who are unable to find a woman as a wife or a sex slave.This cross-cultural textual analysis examined South Korean and Western (U.S. and British) newspaper coverage of North Korean women as victims of human trafficking to discover similarities and differences in those countries’ news frames. The analysis has shown that politics was a crucial factor in the coverage of the issue. However, by generally failing to report on the fundamental causes of the trafficking, such as inequality between genders, both Western and South Korean newspapers perpetuated hegemonic masculinity and failed to inform and educate people about the grave situations of North Korean women defectors and victims of human trafficking. This study recommends that in reporting the trafficking issues, journalists must be able to observe objectively, not within ideologies or frames provided by politicians.

Cette thèse porte sur la constructions des carrières migratoires de femmes issues de la Corée du Nord, de la Corée du Sud et du Japon. L’enjeu est de comprendre la construction objective et subjective de ces parcours à partir d’héritages historiques et culturels des sociétés d'origine, de politiques migratoires, de bifurcations biographiques, d’expériences sociales et de travail au sein d’« espaces totalitaires ». Dans la première partie, la thèse se penche sur les migrations internationales de femmes ainsi que sur la démarche méthodologique mise en place pour collecter des données comparatives auprès de femmes en souffrance au cœur de terrains « minés » et pour les analyser. La deuxième partie s’efforce de reconstituer les carrières objectives des migrantes en se concentrant sur les contextes de départ, la construction des projets migratoires et les contextes d’arrivée. Les migrantes se heurteront à la réitération des grammaires du mépris et de l’injustice – au sens de L. Roulleau-Berger – , aux violences et aux dominations influencées par les imaginaires coloniaux ou nationaux de la population hôte. Les corps « faibles » de ces femmes, au regard des imaginaires individuels et collectifs des sociétés d’accueil, deviennent des corps sensuels, sexuels, résistants etc. et devront se construire socialement au sein « d’espaces totalitaires » érigés au regard de ces imaginaires. La troisième partie analyse la construction des carrières subjectives des femmes issue de la péninsule coréenne et du Japon. Entre les obligations hypertrophiées de s’adapter imposées aux migrantes par le biais de techniques de mortifications – au sens de Goffman – les rôles infligés et les stratégies d’adaptation, elles tentent de survivre à leurs imaginaires migratoires déçus en déployant des tactiques qui se définissent par le refus de toute participation personnelle, l’assimilation du rôle imposé par la société d’accueil ou l’émancipation. / This thesis focuses on the construction of migratory careers of women from North Korea, South Korea and Japan. The challenge is to understand the objective and subjective structure of these routes from historical and cultural heritage of the societies of origin, from migration policies, from biographical bifurcations and from social and work experiences in “totalitarian spaces”. In the first part, the thesis focuses on international migration of women as well as the methodology established to collect comparative data from suffering women in "mined" fieldwork and to analyze them. The second part tries to reconstruct the objective careers of migrants focusing on starting contexts, on the construction of migration projects and on the arrival contexts. The migrants will face the reiteration of grammar of contempt and injustice - in the sense of L. Roulleau-Berger – and the violence and dominations influenced by colonial or national imaginary of the host population. The “weak” bodies of these women, under individual and collective imaginary of host societies, become sensual bodies, sexual bodies, resistant bodies etc. and will build socially in "totalitarian spaces" erected in view of these imaginary. The third section analyzes the construction of the subjective Career of Women of the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Between the bloated obligations to adapt (imposed on migrants through process of mortifications - in the sense of Goffman –), the imposed roles and the adaptive strategies, they try to survive their disappointed migration imaginary by deploying tactics that define by the refusal of any personal participation, assimilation of the role imposed by the host society or emancipation.