Disability

As for people with disabilities, they are shunned as a matter of course. In society at large they are looked on as inferior. One man with a disability said the following…

“In North Korea, we call people with disabilities, the crippled, or people with a lot shortcomings or they use a derogative term to refer to the specific part of their body that is disabled. For example, if you don’t have a hand, or missing a wrist like me, then they would refer to it as a gravel hand. They have derogative terms for blind people, for people who have hearing disabilities. And even instead of names, even to refer to my family, they refer to my family as the family of the gravel hand. So that’s [the] kind of the prejudice that we encountered”.

Families of babies with disabilities have been banished from Pyongyang and forced to relocate to rural areas where there are no services for them, in addition to generally harsher living conditions. According to a former high-level official interviewed by the Commission, the Ministry of Public Security was responsible for cases of children with disabilities. He said that the public security officers visited families to discourage them from keeping children with disabilities. If they were residents of Pyongyang and insisted on keeping their children, the families would have to leave the capital.

☛ Next Up: North Korean Death Camp Inmate Releases Bleak Cartoons Of Ordeal