When Lim reached South Korea, she thought she had left behind the miseries of poverty and an unwanted marriage for a better life with her daughter.

She is one of more than 33,000 North Koreans — the vast majority of them women — who have fled to the South from hardship and repression in their homeland, where the Kim dynasty has ruled with an iron fist for three generations and stands accused of widespread human rights abuses.

The transition to a radically different, democratic and capitalist society — while juggling work, school and motherhood — is not easy. “Life in South Korea was the complete opposite of what I had expected,” Lim said.

Nine years after arriving she still struggles to make ends meet, one of hundreds of North Korean single mothers in similar situations.

Their plight was highlighted by the case of Han Sung-ok, who had difficulties keeping jobs while caring for her epileptic six-year-old son. Their bodies were found in a Seoul flat two months after they are believed to have died from starvation.

News of the deaths sent shockwaves across the country last month and triggered an unprecedented campaign by the defector community urging Seoul to overhaul its aid programme for North Korean refugees.

“Han fled North Korea, where scores of people die from starvation, only to starve to death in South Korea,” said campaigner Heo Kwang-il.

“People come to the democratic South with the ‘Korean Dream’” but many end up suffering from depression and other illnesses, said Lee Na-kyung, a defector activist for single parents and people with disabilities from the North.

Many single mothers who come to the South “have no one to talk to and they feel cut off from the world,” Lee said. “They say even if they were poor in the North, they never felt isolated.”

The vast majority of North Korean migrants go first to neighbouring China before making their way to the South. As the oldest daughter, Lim — who asked to be identified by her surname only — left home at 24 to provide for her family but like many others was trafficked and sold to an abusive Chinese man, with whom she had a child.

After four years of what she described as “imprisonment,” Lim ran away with her toddler daughter to Seoul.

Agence France-Presse