Australia and the Comfort Women

Enforced Prostitution in the New Guinea Campaign, 1942-1945

Dr Caroline Norma (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

224 Seiten

2026
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-350-46433-9 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. April 2026)
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In the aftermath of WWII Australia undertook a number of war crime trials, and yet despite detailed records about Japanese military sexual slavery during the New Guinea Campaign, ‘enforced prostitution’ was not among the crimes prosecuted. This book asks why, when enforced prostitution was listed as a war crime, and both Australian and civilian authorities had reported the Japanese ‘comfort women’ scheme of military sexual slavery, its perpetrators were never called to justice.

Bringing unpublished evidence to light, and employing both English and Japanese archival sources, this book describes the nature and extent of the trafficking and sexual slavery of women in the Pacific theatre of war, and connects it to sexual exploitation and violence in post-war Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Australia. Highlighting the ways in which cultural assumptions about Asian women influenced the perception and treatment of the so-called ‘comfort women’ by Australians, it argues that this prevented the prosecution of perpetrators for war crimes, and contends that these cultural assumptions have continued to influence the business, and tolerance, of sexual slavery in Australia today.

Caroline Norma is Senior Lecturer at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. A historian of Japanese modern history and a qualified Japanese translator and interpreter, she is the author of The Japanese comfort women and sexual slavery during the China and Pacific wars (2015) and Comfort women and post-occupation corporate Japan (2018).

Introduction: Australia and the ‘comfort women’
1. Australia and the New Guinea Campaign
2. America and the New Guinea Campaign: ‘Going for the Girls’
3. Australia’s military labour scheme and the New Guinea Campaign
4. Australian wartime knowledge of the Japanese military ‘comfort women’
5. Japanese military prostitution in the New Guinea Campaign
6. Australian military prostitution in Japan as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF)
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	16.4.2026
Zusatzinfo	10 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
ISBN-10	1-350-46433-3 / 1350464333
ISBN-13	978-1-350-46433-9 / 9781350464339
Zustand	Neuware