Here.
They send them to salt farms where they are enslaved, worked 18 hours a day and then sent back to their quarters where they have no heat or hot water. Most of the disabled are retarded and some are half blind. Everyone on the islands is in on the slavery, even the police.
There are regular escape attempts, but the villagers see the escaped slaves, detain and beat them and call the firm to come take them back, where they are beaten again for running away. All of the police on the islands are in on it, and they regularly catch escapees and return the slaves them to the salt firms.
Slavery is rampant on all of these islands, where it is something of a tradition that has been going on forever. The owners say they are doing the slaves a favor by capturing them, enslaving them and forcing them to work in the salt factories. They say that otherwise the disabled would just be homeless. This may be true because often disabled people are abandoned by their own families, so they become homeless.
Commenter Jason Y has commented many times about how poorly the disabled are treated in South Koreas. I thought he was surely exaggerating until I read this article.
Wow, I thought North Korea was bad. In some ways, South Koreas is just as bad.
