Tag: children

Over at Korea Expose they have an article posted about the growing problem of South Korean men fathering children in the Philippines and leaving the mothers by going back to Korea:

Kristi, 23, met a South Korean man in the city of Makati, Philippines, through a blind date. “It was love at first sight. We were dating for a few months. Soon enough, I found out he was already married with kids. It broke my world so I decided to end it there.”

But things didn’t work out for Kristi: Shortly after their break-up, she realized she was pregnant. “He told me ‘Don’t worry I’m here for you, I won’t leave you,’ but one month before giving birth, he just disappeared.”

It’s a recurring theme: South Korean men go to the Philippines, have relationships of varying degrees of commitment with local women, father children, and then at one point or another flee back to South Korea severing all ties and leaving the mothers alone with the children.

Kristi is one of many thousands of Filipino women who are left to rear their children alone because of absent South Korean fathers. A number often floated around by organizations and media is 30,000, but there has yet to be a clear count or study on the issue.

Kopino — a portmanteau of Korean and Filipino — is a term said to have first been createdin 2004 to refer to a child born to a Filipino mother and a South Korean father — who has often run away.

Kopino children face a number of difficulties in terms of child support, acquisition of nationality and visa issuance. In many cases, the mother — often from a poor background — has no contact with the father, and no knowledge of her former partner’s private details, be it a South Korean phone number, an address, let alone a Korean name. This leaves her to pay all child rearing expenses, even though the South Korean father has a legal obligation to provide support according to South Korea laws.  [Korea Expose]

You can read the rest at the link, but I would not be surprised if this is more than just a Korean problem in the Philippines considering its reputation for sex tourism.

This woman is just absolutely horrible:

A woman confessed to having let her newborn babies die and then storing the bodies in her home refrigerator for fear that her live-in lover would leave if he found out about the births, police said Tuesday.

Police apprehended the 33-year-old woman, only identified by her family name Kim, after the bodies were found wrapped in black envelopes in a freezer in a house in the coastal city of Busan on Saturday.

The Busan Southern Police said Kim tried to conceal her baby deliveries because she feared her partner might leave her if he knew that she gave birth to babies whose father was uncertain. Both babies were daughters.

Kim and the man, who got to know each other five years ago, started to live together last April. The man told investigators that he had no idea of her pregnancy or her disposal of the babies.  [Yonhap]

You can read the details at the link of how she killed her two babies before putting them in the refrigerator.

https://twitter.com/pearswick/status/741133375486976000

In the totally unsurprising news of the day, North Korea has nursery schools that promote the use of rifles, RPGs and hand grenades to its toddlers:

We foreign journalists were supposed to be marveling at the model farm on the outskirts of the North Korean capital – a 1,200-worker-strong vegetable commune with lots of amenities for the fieldhands, including homes equipped with solar power panels and solar water heaters. And I did manage an odd appreciation for the huge mosaic in the parking lot, depicting North Korean founding father Kil Il Sung gazing beatifically across a field of cabbages.

But when our government minders brought us reporters into the Changchon farm community’s nursery school, my brain got a little fixated on the wall art: Just past a painting of children skipping hand-in-hand beneath large letters saying “We Are Happy!” were some fratricidal forest friends.

First to catch my eye was a duck firing a machine gun at a wolf. Then I noticed the squirrel with hand grenades taking out a cowering weasel, with backup provided by a hedgehog with a RPG launcher.  I suppose in a country that has long followed a policy of songun, or “military first,” the powers-that-be figure it’s never too early to let the youngsters know what’s what.  [LA Times]

Here is what the kids are watching, this sounds better than Pororo!:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuXJBJWR36Y

“Squirrel and Hedgehog,” my guides informed me, is as familiar to and beloved by North Korean kids as any Disney toon is to Yankee tots. Produced by state-run SEK Studios, the long-running animated TV show centers on the inhabitants of a make-believe place called Flower Hill, which is populated by squirrels, hedgehogs, and ducks.

The squirrels are the leaders, while the hedgehogs are the soldiers. Ducks are, duh, the navy. As you might guess, this squadron represents North Korea. The Flower Hill gang must contend with evil weasels (Japan) and wolves (the United States), while occasionally dealing with friendly but drunk bears (Russia).

“It’s a classic,” my guide, Ms. Hwang, informed me. “Everyone knows Squirrel and Hedgehog.”

You can read the rest at the link.

The audit of children not attending school in South Korea has led to yet another murdered child.  For some reason I am dubious that all the blame for the murder of this child goes on to the mother:

Police arrested Sunday a middle-aged man in Cheongju, North Chungcheong who admitted to secretly burying his four-year-old stepdaughter’s body on a mountain five years ago.

A day before, the girl’s 36-year-old mother asphyxiated herself after being questioned about the girl’s disappearance by police. She left a suicide note admitting to killing the girl but not saying how.

The case was the latest discovery of a child murder by an ongoing government campaign to find missing kids, which was sparked by the escape in December of an 11-year-old girl who had been imprisoned in her own house for two years and almost starved.

In Cheongju, the girl’s biological mother, who has only been identified by the surname Han, was unmarried when she gave birth to the girl. In May 2011 she married the man in the case, who is surnamed Ahn and is now 38 years old.

Eight months after the wedding, the girl died at the age of four.

According to Cheongju police, Ahn puts all the blame on his late wife. At a press briefing on Sunday, they say he claims his wife was angry at the daughter’s slow progress in toilet-training.

Allegedly, the mother shoved the girl’s head in a tub filled with water “several times” because she wouldn’t obey her orders.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link, but I wonder what the results in the US would be if each kid that did not show up for school was investigated like they are doing currently in Korea?

I just can’t believe they actually had to do research to figure this out.  Maybe I should start my own “ROK Drop Institute of Common Sense” and get in on some these research dollars?:

A state-run research agency says the more affluent and intimate married couples are, the more likely it is for them to have a second child.

The Korea Institute of Child Care and Education under the Prime Minister’s Office released the conclusion in a report after analyzing the 2012 Panel Study on Korean Children conducted on around 400 couples with a single child.

According to the analysis, the higher the income of the couple, the more likely they planned to have a second baby.

Other factors raising the likelihood of having a second child were a high level of marital satisfaction on the part of the wife and a good relationship between the spouses. [KBS Global]

You can read more at the link.

If you feels like Seoul has a lot of elderly people living in it, you would be right:

Senior citizens in Seoul have outnumbered children for the first time, the Seoul Metropolitan Government said Thursday.

As of April 30, there were 1,234,181 people 65 or over in the capital, slightly surpassing the number of children under 15 ― 1,232,194.

The aging index, the ratio of elderly people to children, recorded 100.4, exceeding 100 for the first time.

“The higher index means the number of elderly citizens is increasing more than the younger generation, which will be the working-age population needed to support them,” a city official said.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Anyone surprised by these results?

South Korean school children were the least happy among those in OECD countries, a recent survey showed.

In the latest survey, the subjective happiness index of South Korean children was 60.3 percent, which was the lowest among the OECD countries.  [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link.