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Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors says

Wouldn’t you think the media would be a little more invested in figuring out why Ling and Lee were considered threats by North Korea? It’s because they were investigating sex trafficking for Current TV, as only briefly noted in this NYT article, which states: “It ended a harrowing ordeal for the two women, who were stopped on March 17 by soldiers near North Korea’s border with China while researching a report about women and human trafficking.”

She said it here.

To be perfectly honest no, I don’t think the press was so much not invested in the trafficking angle as they were in the much more operatic “ZOMG North Korea’s Got Kim Jong-il and Teh Bomb.” An oldie but goldie for the press since the lead up to the Korean War in the 1950s.

That’s not to say the situation for North Korean migrants in China isn’t really, really dire. They caught firmly in classic political and economic shears: on the one hand there’s no, zero, none opportunity in North Korea and a fairly substantial chance of outright starvation; on the other hand it’s particularly illegal to migrate without documentation to China from Korea, and the penalty (being “repatriated”) brings gruesome penalties at home. Consequently migrants there, like, say, undocumented Romanian migrants in Italy or undocumented Haitian migrants in Florida are extraordinarily vulnerable to sexual or other forms of labor exploitation. Something about “all I have to do is contact the authorities and you’ll be dead in a month” that really gives employers… or for that matter random-but-documented passers by… extraordinary leverage in negotiating, um, tasks and wages.

When the border in question separates cultures which both have strikingly awful human rights records and indifferent to bad attitudes towards women in particular then yeah, good for Lee and Ling for putting their lives on the line to shine light on the situation. Now that they’re home, and once they’re rested, I hope Lee and Ling will have an opportunity to write not only about their experiences in custody but also about the topics they went into jeopardy to cover in the first place.