By Jae-hyung Kim, Kwi-byung Kwak, Il-hwan Kim, Hae-nam Park, Jun-chol So, Sang-jic Lee, Jong-sook Choi and Ji-hyun Choo

This article exposes human rights violations committed at Brothers Home in Busan, South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, identifying their structural causes and discussing Korean society’s efforts to address them. From 1975 to 1987, Brothers Home was the largest group residential facility for the homeless, the ill, the disabled, and the poor—a program that was even commended by the Korean government. However, over the years, various human rights abuses led to the death of 657 residents. While these violations remained hidden from public view for almost 25 years, survivors and supporters waged a long battle to bring them to light. Recently, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated and confirmed the human rights violations as state violence . In this essay, the authors assess the significance this case holds for Korean society.

Asia-Pacific Journal (Japan Focus) Volume 21 | Issue 6 | Number 1 | Article ID 5775 | Jun 03, 2023

By John Davies

This book challenges every common presumption that exists about the trafficking of women for the sex trade. It is a detailed account of an entire population of trafficked Albanian women whose varied experiences, including selling sex on the streets of France, clearly demonstrate how much the present discourse about trafficked women is misplaced and inadequate. The heterogeneity of the women involved and their relationships with various men is clearly presented as is the way women actively created a panoptical surveillance of themselves as a means of self-policing. There is no artificial divide between women who were deceived and abused and those who "choose" sex work; in fact the book clearly shows how peripheral involvement in sex work was to the real agenda of the women involved. Most of the women described in this book were not making economic decisions to escape desperate poverty nor were they the uneducated naïve entrapped into sexual slavery. The women's success in transiting trafficking to achieve their own goals without the assistance of any outside agency is a testimony to their resilience and resolve.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 325p.

Edited by Cecilia M. Benoit

The impetus behind this Special Issue emerged from a quest to move beyondbinary thinking in the contemporary period about people who sell sexual services,including recent disputes about “sex trafficking vs. prostitution” and“criminalization vs. decriminalization”, to encourage theoretical and empiricalscholarship by exploring how sex work actually operates under different regulatoryregimes. The volume includes contributions from scholars of different socialsciences backgrounds based in five countries– New Zealand, the United Kingdom,Brazil, the United States and Canada. The article topics range widely,and both quantitative and qualitative research methods are showcased. The empiricalevidence presented adds to our current understanding of the complexityof this phenomenon of sex commerce/prostitution, which is found to be largelya problem of social inequality within and across capitalist societies. The authors call for policies to address occupational and societal wide inequities faced by sexworkers across many countries.

Basel, SWIT: MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021. 180p.

By Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp .

Affective Strategies in Transnational Media. Extreme Cinema examines the highly stylized treatment of sex and violence in post-millennial transnational cinema, where the governing convention is not the narrative but the spectacle. Using profound experiments in form and composition, including jarring editing, extreme close-ups, visual disorientation and sounds that straddle the boundary between non-diegetic and diegetic registers, this mode of cinema dwells instead on the exhibition of intense violence and an acute intimacy with the sexual body. Interrogating works such as Wetlands and A Serbian Film, as well as the sub-culture of YouTube ‘reaction videos’, Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp demonstrate the way content and form combine in extreme cinema to affectively manipulate the viewing body.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 188p.

By Sabrina Marchetti, Daniela Cherubini and Giulia Garofalo Geymonat.

Intersectional Inequalities and Struggles for Rights. “Domestic workers tend to universally epitomize the figure of the low-skilled, low-valued, precarious, hidden and unorganized labourer. Overwhelmingly women, migrant and working class, they are also commonly low-caste, Black and indigenous. Belonging to society’s most marginalized groups, they are largely excluded from labour protection laws and are significantly impacted by the social shifts brought about by globalization.”

Policy Press (2021) 180p.