Former journalist, filmmaker and philanthropist Sylvia Yu Friedman has dedicated her life to fighting for the rights of women and girls as an anti-slavery campaigner. With the release of a new book—and a new role to boot—she hopes to share what she has learned with other Asian women
Sylvia Yu Friedman was 16 years old when she found her calling in life. “I didn’t realise that it was something that I would immerse myself in for decades to come,” she recalls. But when she learnt the story of a Japanese comfort woman whose life was destroyed by sexual enslavement in a military war zone, she says it “sparked the fire in my belly”.
On August 14, 1991, 68-year-old Kim Hak-soon chose to break her silence at a press conference in Seoul, sharing how, 50 years previously, she had been forced into sex slavery during the Japanese war against China. She recounted being raped up to 30 times a day by Japanese soldiers. Kim was one of what has been estimated to be as many as 400,000 “comfort women” forced to work in Japanese military brothels during the Second World War.
Yu Friedman had been shown a newspaper clipping of the story by her mother and, having been born in South Korea, she found herself particularly curious to find out more. However, she says that back then Japanese military sex slavery was a topic that people had often only heard about through their families, with few books in English telling survivor stories.
In 2001, when Yu Friedman was working as a television reporter in Canada, where she grew up, she had the opportunity to meet her first survivor, 80-year-old Kim Soon-duk, who had also been a comfort woman for the Japanese.
“It was seeing someone who’s a walking history book, and also being stunned that her story was not documented, that the experiences of these young girls, who were my age at that time, were erased,” says Yu Friedman, who would go on to meet and interview more survivors, telling their stories in her book Silenced No More: Voices of Comfort Women, which was published in 2015.
Through her work as a journalist and filmmaker, Yu Friedman exposed many forms of human exploitation, from debt bondage of domestic workers to compensated dating and slave grooms
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In addition to her journalism and writing, Yu Friedman had also taken on work as a philanthropy fund manager, working in Beijing before settling in Hong Kong where she had started working with Matthew Friedman (who would later become her husband), who founded the Mekong Club in 2011, a non-profit organisation that works with businesses to combat modern slavery.
Two decades after Kim Hak-soon had shared her story, Yu Friedman found that many people were under the impression that slavery had ended, because they often conflated slavery with the transatlantic slave trade. However, there were—and still are—many other forms of exploitation, which Yu Friedman was exposing through her journalism. This included doing investigative work to uncover the debt bondage of domestic workers who were being made to pay exorbitant agent fees in their first months of working; and a series of articles on the various forms of modern slavery, from compensated dating to slave grooms to child domestic workers, some as young as 13, who were being brought into Hong Kong and Singapore to work.
“I was able to expose that to raise awareness to get them help and to hopefully stop others from getting into this horrible cycle,” she says.
Concurrently, Yu Friedman also became a filmmaker. In 2013, she made a documentary series about human trafficking in mainland China, Hong Kong and Thailand, and in 2018 made the short film From Darkness to Hope: Transformation of an Ex-Trafficker.
Recently, she added another string to her bow when she started working in private equity, with a goal to make money to fund her own philanthropic and social impact projects.
