North Korean Teens : Recently, an organization working with North Korean defectors, the South and North Development (SAND) Institute, has released video footage depicting the public sentencing of two North Korean teens in Pyongyang. The BBC reported that these 16-year-olds were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for the alleged crime of watching K-pop and K-dramas. The footage, believed to be from 2022, shows the teenagers in handcuffs in front of a large audience at an outdoor stadium, with uniformed officers reprimanding hundreds of students for not reflecting deeply on their supposed mistakes.
The charges against the teenagers include watching and spreading South Korean movies, music, and music videos over a three-month period. The narrator in the video asserts that these individuals were seduced by foreign culture, leading them to ruin their lives. The punishment for minors engaging in such activities typically involved being sent to labor camps instead of traditional prisons, with sentences usually less than five years. However, a law enacted in 2020 in Pyongyang escalated the penalties for watching or distributing South Korean entertainment to death.
Choi Kyong-hui, the president of SAND and a defector from North Korea, suggests that the harsh punishment is intended as a warning to the wider North Korean population. She notes that Millennials and Gen Z in North Korea are adopting a more open-minded perspective, and Kim Jong-un may be working to revert their thinking to align with traditional North Korean values.
Footage of (North Korean Teens) this nature is extremely rare due to North Korea’s strict prohibition on the dissemination of photos, videos, and other evidence of life within the country. The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war since the 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, resulting in a heavily fortified demilitarized zone (DMZ) dividing the reclusive North and the prosperous, democratic South.
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