Prison for North Korean parents who let their children watch Hollywood films

Parents who let their children watch Hollywood blockbusters will be sent to prison camps, North Korea has announced.

Pyongyang is intensifying its efforts to eradicate foreign films and television programmes with parents told that they will be punished if their children are caught watching illicit overseas movies just once.

Previously, parents could escape with a stern warning if their children were found in possession of media smuggled into the North from overseas.

“Inminban” or compulsory neighbourhood watch meetings are being rolled out to inform parents there will no longer be leniency if their children are exposed to western media, Radio Free Asia reported.

Quoting sources inside North Korea, the report said parents are being instructed to educate their children “properly” in the state’s socialist ideals.

A parent whose son or daughter is caught watching a foreign movie will go to a labour camp for six months – but their children will have to serve five years. Anyone found talking, dancing or singing “like a South Korean” will serve six months, with their parents serving a similar term.

“The host of the meeting emphasises parental responsibility, saying that education for children begins at home”, the source told RFA. “If parents do not educate their children from moment to moment, they will dance and sing of capitalism and become anti-socialists”.

Death for selling smuggled videos

Anyone who is convicted of selling smuggled videos can be sentenced to death.

In October, two teenagers were reportedly executed by firing squad in the city of Hyesan, on the border with China, after being found guilty of watching and distributing South Korean films.

Images have also emerged of a group of children and parents seated before a large crowd as their sentences are read out for breaking the Rejection of Reactionary Thought and Culture Act by watching foreign films.

The regime of Kim Jong-un has cracked down hard on imported popular culture, apparently out of fear that a younger generation of North Koreans is increasingly being exposed to external influences.

CDs and thumb drives smuggled over the border from China have led to more young people picking up South Korean slang and affecting hairstyles and tiny fashion details that deviate from what is considered acceptable in the North.