Their Words Make Freedom Real
A Fundraising Appeal from Freedom Speakers International
Seventy-five percent of the public speakers at Freedom Speakers International (FSI) are women. The number would be even higher, but many North Korean refugee single mothers tell us that they aren't ready because their English isn't strong enough.
To help them prepare for public speaking, FSI is launching a new English tutoring project.
Eighty-eight percent of the North Koreans who reached South Korea in 2025 were women. Across more than twenty-five years and 34,537 arrivals, women have accounted for seventy-two percent of the total, a pattern that runs far above the global refugee average of about fifty percent female, according to UNHCR.
Most of these women crossed in their twenties and thirties. A 2023 UN High Commissioner for Refugees survey found that roughly eighty percent of North Korean women residing in China reported having children there. Many arrive in South Korea as single mothers, often still working to bring children born in China across the final border.
Arrival in South Korea begins a different kind of struggle. Over the past three years, the suicide rate among North Korean refugees is roughly 1.7 times South Korea's national rate. Depression prevalence among North Korean refugee women runs around forty percent, nearly twice the rate among South Korean women. Full PTSD in North Korean refugees' first six months in the South has been measured at 27.2 percent.
Freedom Speakers International was co-founded in 2013 by Casey Lartigue Jr. and Eunkoo Lee. Since its founding, FSI has worked with more than 700 North Korean refugees as participants in English learning, public speaking mentoring, and book publishing. More than 1,300 volunteers have volunteered as mentors and tutors. FSI has organized over 1,000 public forums and hosted 23 English speech contests under the banner of "I am from North Korea."
Donor support, at any level, covers speech coaching and publishing costs for North Korean refugee authors, stipends and childcare for North Korean refugee speakers who are single mothers, and the public forums and speech contests where North Korean refugee voices reach new audiences.
