To the Editor:
“Apology, if Not Closure, for ‘Comfort Women’ ” (front page, Dec. 29) describes an agreement meant to settle the dispute over the “Korean women” who were “lured or coerced to work in brothels” for Japanese soldiers during World War II.
As survivors have testified, many targets of this brutal system of sexual slavery were not “women,” but girls of 13 or 14. Many had not even begun menstruating when they were shipped as human cargo to battlefronts across Asia and subjected to daily rape.
These were not only war crimes, but crimes of child sex trafficking. Until they are represented as such in textbooks in Japan — and in news articles in the West — there is no true justice for these victims.
MARGARET D. STETZ
Newark, Del.
The writer, a professor of women’s studies at the University of Delaware, is co-editor of “Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II.”