It’s only Wednesday, but for my money, the most important international article The New York Times will publish this week is this one about women in South Korea forced or tricked into violent sexual servitude as “comfort women” for foreign soldiers.

The story of Korean women enslaved by the Japanese during World War II is now well known. But my colleague Choe Sang-Hun’s article is about a different group of women, who were exploited far more recently, in “comfort stations” that their own government facilitated — and whose customers included American soldiers.

Last September, the South Korean Supreme Court awarded 100 women a landmark judgment that found the government guilty of “justifying and encouraging” prostitution in camp towns to help South Korea maintain its military alliance with the United States and earn American dollars.

But referring to it as “prostitution” drastically understates the violence and abuse involved. Some victims were kidnapped as teenagers and forced into sexual slavery. The women who spoke to The Times recalled being detained in facilities with barred windows in an effort to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, where they said they saw colleagues collapse and die of penicillin shock.

There is no evidence that the South Korean government was directly involved in kidnapping or recruiting women for American troops. But the government did facilitate the program, including through health rules mandating coercive treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and benefit from it.

It is an extreme case. But the idea that women exist as a kind of natural resource to be exploited in service of political and economic goals, rather than as people in their own right, is an attitude so common that it often goes unmentioned and even unnoticed.

In that worldview, I often think, women are viewed like “nonplayer characters,” or NPCs, in a video game. They are there to be acted upon or interacted with, protected or abused, in the course of powerful people’s interactions with one another — a way to keep score, but not perceived as fellow players in the game.

Time and again, the women in the so-called comfort stations were treated as NPCs in South Korea’s foreign relations with the United States, and sometimes with Japan.

The South Korean government exploited the women to shore up its alliance with the United States and obtain dollars. Then later, it suppressed reports of the abuse.

In the 2000s, when a sociologist named Kim Gwi-ok began reporting on the South Korean government’s exploitation of women in the comfort stations, the government sealed the military records she was relying on for her research. “They feared that Japan’s right wing would use it to help whitewash its own comfort women history,” Ms. Kim told Choe.

And the U.S. military, despite a stated policy of “total suppression” of prostitution, created an elaborate regulatory structure focused on limiting outbreaks of sexually transmitted infections among American troops — which is to say, protecting the soldiers, and by extension, U.S. military objectives, rather than the women who were being abused.

“I got interested in these women’s story when I learned that South Korea had its own ‘comfort women’ but didn’t talk much about them, while railing against Japan for recruiting and exploiting comfort-woman sex slaves,” Choe told me. “Reporting the story helped me see the so-called comfort women issue in a broader context and once again realize how the weak in our societies, and female victims of violence, often don’t get the voice they deserve.”

This NPC syndrome is a depressing way to read world events, but I find it’s often a useful one for understanding apparent contradictions in public policy.

It might seem puzzling, for instance, that Donald Trump’s executive order barring immigrants and refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries — often referred to as the “Muslim ban” — included multiple references to preventing violence against women and preventing honor killings.

If the goal were actually to protect women, then barring female refugees from reaching safety in the United States would have seemed counterproductive. But if decrying violence against women is a way to vilify a political enemy, then protection is beside the point.

Similarly, French politicians have often argued that bans on the “burkini,” a full-body swimsuit worn by some religious Muslims, are a way to protect women from oppressive religious rules — even though many Muslim women argue that the bans themselves, which effectively bar religious women from swimming in public, are oppressive.

But the rules are easier to understand if you see them as a way “to police what is French and what is not French,” the historian Terrence G. Peterson, a professor at Florida International University who studies France’s relationship with Muslim immigrants and the Muslim world, told me in 2016, when such bans began.

It is not just women, of course, who can be treated this way. Any less-powerful group can be used as a tool for political purposes; and plenty of individual men and women have seen their life stories twisted to fit a media narrative or a political argument. But gender norms may make women particularly easy targets, because so many cultures treat women as unworthy of protection or respect if they have transgressed norms of sexual respectability.

In 2008, when the Florida authorities discovered that Jeffrey Epstein was having sex with underage girls, they allowed him to plead guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution and soliciting prostitution. This framed his victims as prostitutes motivated by money, rather than abused children, and drew focus away from the harm Epstein did to them.

In the documentary “Tales of the Grim Sleeper,” the director Nick Broomfield investigated how a serial killer could have preyed on women in Los Angeles for years without the police taking action. Some L.A.P.D. officers, he found, had a term for the killings of sex workers and gang members at the time: N.H.I., which stood for “no human involved.”

In South Korea, many of the women abused were rejected by their communities for the shame of participating in sex work. Some who died were buried by the government after their families did not claim their bodies.

“The Americans need to know what some of their soldiers did to us,” Park Geun-ae, who was kidnapped and sold to a pimp when she was 16, told Choe. “Our country held hands with the U.S. in an alliance and we knew that its soldiers were here to help us, but that didn’t mean that they could do whatever they wanted to us, did it?”