This August, we submitted our annual written contributions on the human rights experiences of North Korean women – in their home country, in China as migrants, and in South Korea as hopeful compatriots. And, like in previous years, we had little progress to report on; in fact, in some respects there has been a regression in the status of defector women in China and South Korea. One constant, however, remains unchanged – North Korean women’s determination to survive and ‘dream of freedom’. This is the first installment of a three-part email series discussing the journey of North Korean women from tyranny to liberty, mapping their impossible resilience at each perilous step in their voyage. We draw from our report, ‘Daring to Even Dream of Freedom’, which we published earlier this year. “I didn’t know I was hungry until I was eight years old”… …revealed Gyuri Kang to a captivated audience at the United States General Assembly in New York in May 2025. These words may seem confounding to many of us who have grown up in developed countries and relative privilege. How can someone not know they are hungry? The answer, though harrowing, is straightforward: North Korea is a culture of starvation and deprivation. For people like Gyuri, the feeling of hunger knew no name, it was just a persistent state of being; it did not come and go, it stayed. She had never known otherwise. But before she even turned ten years old, she made a sobering realization that the life she and
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