Here is an update on the aftermath of the Gangnam murder case:
Korea on Wednesday unveiled a series of measures aimed at creating a more equal society for women, about a month after a woman was killed by a stranger in a high-traffic neighborhood in Seoul.
The murder sent a shockwave through a nation that has made strides in recent years but apparently leaves much to be desired in areas of gender equality.
The measures announced Wednesday focus on preventing hate crimes against women, better protecting victims of such crimes and raising awareness for gender equality in the country, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family said. It held ministerial-level talks with the Ministry of Education and the National Police Agency.
The measures are a follow-up to the first batch announced earlier this month when Korea decided to seek the maximum default sentence for hate crimes against women and actively appeal sentences that fall short. [Korea Times]
You can read the rest at the link, but the murder of the young Korean woman in Gangnam reminds me so much of the Orlando shooting debate. The scale of the two murders is no where near the same, but both led to false national debates. For the Orlando shooting the debate has centered on banning so called “assault rifles” though no one has shown any evidence the terrorist would not have shot up that night club if every AR-15 in the country was confiscated. The real problem appears to be once again a person with a history of mental trouble that was easily influenced by radical Islamic extremism.
In the Gangman murder the national debate in Korea has been about hate crimes against women when the murderer for years was in and out of mental hospitals and became homeless because his family could no longer handle caring for him due to his mental illness. In my opinion the national debate to respond to both murder incidents does not address the core problems, but instead have been hijacked by activists to push pet political causes.
Even in the worst of times of US-ROK relations during the Roh Moo-hyun administration years there was never government officials driving around with blue lights on their cars looking to harass US servicemembers like what is currently happening in Okinawa:
Japanese officials are patrolling areas in southwestern Okinawa in an effort to prevent crimes near U.S. military bases and entertainment districts.
The team, composed of about 40 staff members from Okinawa government agencies, was created after a former Marine working at Kadena Air Base was arrested May 19 in connection with the death of a 20-year-old Okinawan woman, Japanese broadcaster NHK reported Wednesday.
The patrol vehicles, which use blue rotating lights, are on the streets between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., the report said. The number of police officers patrolling the island prefecture is also expected to increase. [Stars & Stripes]
You can read the rest at the link, but this looks like pure political theater. Some government official driving around with a blue light would have done nothing to prevent the tragic murder of Ms. Shimabukuro.
Despite being convicted of embezzling nearly a million dollars, the CEO of the largest foreign language business in South Korea, Pagoda has received no jail time with her entire sentence being suspended:
Park Kyung-sil
PAGODA Academy CEO Park Kyung-sil was found guilty of embezzlement and breach of trust, an appellate court said Tuesday.
The Seoul High Court sentenced the 61-year-old leader of Korea’s major foreign language institute to two-years-and-six months in prison with the term suspended for three years.
The ruling was made after the court reviewed the case at the request of the Supreme Court, which found faults with the grounds for the appellate court’s ruling.
Park was indicted in 2013 on charges of pocketing one billion won ($849,000) in corporate money and inflicting losses of 53 billion won on the company by mismanagement. She pled guilty to the embezzlement charge. [Korea Times]
The arrest of the three men accused of gang raping a Korean teacher on the remote Korean island Heuksan-do has finally happened. Due to the public outrage it appears the Korean police are not going to give the perpetrators the benefit of using the “I was drunk excuse” so commonly used in these cases:
Three suspects have been charged with premeditated rape and assault in the investigation of a sexual assault case involving a female teacher in her 20s by three local men from Heuksan Island in Sinan County, South Jeolla.
The three suspects were scheduled to be sent to the prosecution today for further investigation. Each is a father of children in kindergarten, elementary or middle school. The children of two of the suspects are attending the school where the victim worked. They were arrested by police last Saturday, after the victim reported the crime.
One of the suspects, surnamed Park, 49, owns the restaurant where the teacher was having dinner prior to the crime on May 21. He and one other suspect, Lee, 34, are accused of having invited the teacher to join them and getting her drunk.
After the victim became intoxicated, Park brought her to a building at an elementary school at 11:00 p.m in his car while Lee followed. About 30 minutes later, police say, the other suspect, Kim, 38, drove to the elementary school building, as well.
The police initially planned to impose less severe charges on the three since they claimed the rape was not planned.
“The testimonies of the three suspects didn’t match,” said a police officer. “They seemed to have lied when they said the crime was not plotted.”
But given that the three suspects live in the same neighborhood, contacted each other before and after the crime and went inside the building and raped the victim in sequence, the police charged them with premeditated rape. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link. Also for those wondering where Heuksan-do island is located at here is a Google Map of its location:
Incredibly the arrest of one of the suspects surnamed Kim has been linked to a 2007 rape in Daejon. The DNA found on the teacher matched the DNA found on the victim in the Daejon case. Due to the victim speaking out about this rape she may have gotten a serial rapist off the streets. It seems like if someone wanted to lie low and hide out somewhere Heuksando would be a place to go.
Is it accurate to say that someone was “forced” into prostitution when the soldier in the below article willing decided to work for the pimp for financial gain? For sake of argument if a woman decided to break the law by robbing houses while a man sat in the get away car outside would we say the woman was forced into burglary? To me it seems they are both equally guilty.
A man who forced a 19-year-old Fort Bragg soldier into prostitution last year threatened to tell the soldier’s commander about her exchanging sex for money, new court documents say.
The court documents also revealed that the soldier was the victim of sex trafficking as a juvenile.
Jibri Quandel Thomas, 23, of the 3200 block of Brookemere Place, was charged by the Fayetteville Police Department in connection with exploiting the soldier. He turned himself in to Fayetteville police detectives Jan. 11 and was indicted in federal court Jan. 28.
A superseding indictment in federal court filed April 25 charged Thomas with two counts of transporting for prostitution and racketeering for prostitution. [Fayetteville Observer]
You can read the rest at the link, but it sounds like this soldier probably should have never been in the Army in the first place considering she was a practicing prostitute at the age of 17 before she even enlisted. Joining the military was an opportunity for this soldier to turn her life around; it is unfortunate she did seize that opportunity.
It looks like a New Zealand diplomat and his friends are in some serious trouble from an incident that happened recently in Itaewon:
Police questioned a New Zealand diplomat on Wednesday for allegedly obstructing officers who tried to arrest his friends on suspicion of molesting a female bar worker.
Yongsan Police Station in Seoul said two companions of the diplomat, whose identity remains unknown, allegedly molested a female employee at a bar in Itaewon Tuesday night and assaulted a security guard who tried to take them to police. As police tried to arrest the two, the diplomat allegedly pushed them and kicked the patrol car.
The diplomat and his friends were taken to the police station that night. But the diplomat was freed under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which gives foreign diplomats here immunity from civil or criminal prosecution. [Korea Times]
Flanked by police officers, the suspect behind the brutal murder of a 23-year-old woman enters a karaoke bar near a subway station in Seoul’s upscale Gangnam district on May 24, 2016, to stage a reconstruction. The 34-year-old man fatally knifed the victim in the bar’s bathroom a week ago in an alleged random crime, whipping up a nationwide outpouring of mourning. (Yonhap)
The recent murder of a Korean woman in Gangnam is being used to bring attention to the issue of violent crime against women. Now Vice News has jumped on the bandwagon to publish an article criticizing a culture that allows violent crimes against women in South Korea to occur:
ourners march during a rally on Saturday to pay tribute to a South Korean woman who was stabbed to death near Gangnam Station in Seoul. [AP/NEWSIS]
For years now, South Korea has been trying to build a legal system to deal with the problem. As Dr Kyungja Jung, of the University of Technology Sydney told me, the country has come far since the days when police themselves would sexually assault detained female activists.”There has been tremendous changes in legislation, services, and programs for the victims,” she said.
Neither is South Korea the only country struggling with the issue. All countries experience some baseline level of sexism and the latest numbers from the World Health Organisation suggest 35 percent of women worldwide have experienced sexual violence.
But South Korea, a country with one of the most influential youth cultures in Asia, is also a society with a deep gender inequality according to the World Economic Forum which ranks the nation 117 out of 142, putting it alongside Qatar and Nigeria.
This is a subject Koreans do not like to discuss, partly because defamation laws in the country are strong, making criticism of the government, police, or major corporations dangerous. Many of those I contacted over the last two weeks were afraid to talk for fear of a lawsuit, though few would say so outright.
When they responded, they were often “too busy.” One person who worked in a frontline support service for rape victims told someone who had contacted them on my behalf: “This is a sensitive issue and I am Korean.”
Those more willing to speak out were young activists. One male activist who worked on a team which monitored rapists on Sora.net told me that in 1995, seven out of 10 women were victims of violent crimes, but that number has increased to nine out of 10. Because I can’t speak Korean, I cannot easily verify those numbers, but I asked him why he thought that was. [Vice News]
You can read much more at the link, but in my opinion this article is poor journalism which this last excerpted paragraph is an example of. The writer admits that he can’t verify the statistic that 9 out of 10 women in South Korea were victims of violent crimes, but went ahead and published it anyway. If 90% of the women in Korea are victims of violent crime there would be a political revolution to improve public safety. The President is a woman so does anyone think she would stand for such a thing?
Poor Example
A random murder by a mentally deranged homeless person that had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals does not suddenly make South Korea a haven for violent crime against women. Speaking of this murderer the article made no mention that he was schizophrenic and instead led readers to believe he simply killed the woman because he hated women. This narrative is about as honest as the “gentle giant” narrative used by the US media after the Michael Brown shooting.
As far as some of the other examples used in the article such as the Australian woman interviewed and the man acquitted of rape because he had a curved man part I would like to hear the other side of the story because often these stories are never as simple as advocates claim them to be. With that all said the premise that South Korea has a problem investigating sexual assault cases I think is true, I just hate tabloid journalism being used to make this point.
Past Investigations
In the past South Korean authorities were just incompetent with dealing with violent crime against women. I can remember when a US soldier was raped shortly after she arrived at Incheon International Airport and the rapist was acquitted because the soldier did not resist enough. In another case the sentencing for rape was so light that whether the suspect committed robbery as was the focus of the case because it had more jail time. Then there is this case of a foreign English teacher who was brutally raped and forced to suffer police incompetence afterwards. Finally who can forget the Miryang Gang Rape case which was just a travesty.
I do have to admit that things have gotten better in recent years such as South Korea finally barring teachers convicted of sex crimes of getting their jobs back. Even the ROK military has launched a campaign to crackdown on sexual assault and harassment within their ranks which they have long been known for. What do the statistics say? Well they say arrests for rape have skyrocketed over the last decade.
It is important to keep in mind that just because arrests are up this does not necessarily mean that rape is up. It can be argued that due to awareness campaigns in South Korea women are now more likely to report rape and the police are taking the allegations more seriously.
How do these statistics stack up against the United States? With a population of 51 million people in South Korea and 20,045 rape arrests in 2014 this has a occurence rate of 1 in 2,544 people. The Department of Justice reported 284,350 rapes in the United States in 2014 and with a population of 318 million this comes out to an occurrence rate of 1 in 1,118 people. This is higher than South Korea, but keep in mind difference in statistic compilation does make comparisons difficult, but does give an indication that rapes are lower in South Korea than the US.
Conclusion
Today I think the problem is mostly how Korean police look differently at alcohol related sexual assaults than other countries. If Korea is like the US, the vast majority of rape cases are probably he said/she said cases that involve alcohol. When alcohol is involved South Korean authorities are well known for showing more leniency towards perpetrators though in recent years there has been some changes to the law. In the United States alcohol is not considered the mitigating factor for committing crime like it is in South Korea. In fact at least in the US military alcohol has been used as factor to over prosecute people for sexual assault.
This is an area I think women in Korea need to be aware of that a date rape type of scenario after a night of drinking alcohol, it is likely to be more difficult to get Korean authorities to vigorously investigate and prosecute the perpetrator. So looking at the facts South Korea does not necessarily have a violent crime problem against women, it just has a different perspective in regards to how vigorously it will prosecute these crimes when it involves alcohol. This perspective appears to be slowly changing with the increased rape arrests and I would not be surprised if arrests continue to increase in the coming years as societal attitudes towards the crime continue to change.
This murder case in Hawaii has just gotten a whole lot weirder. Obviously this NCO has some serious sexual issues if he is having affairs, watching child porn and prostituting himself to other men:
An Army medic charged with conspiring with his lover to kill his wife in Hawaii will be court-martialed for child pornography and prostitution charges that surfaced while investigating the killing.
Sgt. Michael Walker’s general court-martial is set for June 20 and June 21 at Wheeler Army Airfield on Oahu, said Jim Guzior, spokesman for Tripler Army Medical Center, where Walker has been assigned since 2013. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for next week.
Walker has pleaded not guilty to a murder charge in civilian court in the killing of Catherine Walker, who was found stabbed to death in November 2014 in the military housing the couple shared in Honolulu.
Army prosecutors revealed new allegations during a military judicial hearing in March, where they said Michael Walker is accused of possessing and viewing child pornography and receiving money in exchange for sex with men. [Stars & Stripes]
It might help to track this guy down if a picture of what he looked like was available:
A U.S. soldier under military investigation has disappeared from a base near the border with North Korea, a spokesman said Thursday.
The missing soldier is being investigated for a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, said Lt. Col. Richard Hyde, a 2nd Infantry Division spokesman. South Korean police said the soldier had been scheduled to face a court-martial Wednesday, but the military declined to confirm that or provide details about the charges.
The soldier, who is in his 20s, is not wanted for a violent crime, Hyde said.
“We do not believe that he is armed or dangerous,” he said. “He is believed to be in Seoul.” [Stars & Stripes]
Statistics from the 
