Bullying and Violence in South Korea: From Home to School and Beyond

© The Author(s) 2016

Trent BaxBullying and Violence in South KoreaPalgrave Advances in Criminology and Criminal Justice in Asia10.1007/978-3-319-44612-7_1

1. Introduction: South Korea’s Young, How Are You Doing?

Trent Bax¹ 

(1)

Department of Sociology, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

Trees that go through windy storms have deeper roots and bear more nourishing fruit.

This message is carved into a stone that sits at the entrance of the ‘Seoul Juvenile Training School’ where the author has conducted research and volunteer work.

The Case of Yoon-a

At the end of 2011, just as school violence was about to hit the national headlines, ‘Yoon-a’ was detained for one month at a ‘Juvenile Classification and Examination Center’ southwest of Seoul on school violence-related charges. Yoon-a had no prior criminal record and this was the first time she was put under police investigation. Like the K-pop boy-band Infinite, there were seven members in her ‘il-jin’ or ‘delinquent’ peer group. While her fellow group members were in the 2nd grade of high school, Yoon-a was herself in the 3rd grade. Her seniority bestowed upon her a degree of authority and power—which she both used and misused. The group members all knew each other from middle school and had maintained close and intimate contact after entering high school. Each of them had, to varying degrees, engaged in extortion by threatening their 1st grade juniors to hand over money.

‘Sung-kyu,’ the ‘jjang’ or leader of the group, threatened his juniors by telling them they had 10 days to hand over 100,000 won, ‘or else.’¹ Another member, ‘Dong-woo,’ extorted 20,000 won on one occasion and 30,000 won on another. He also threatened a ‘friend’ who had sniffed glue in a karaoke bar by telling him that unless he handed over 470,000 won, he would tell their school about his glue-sniffing ways. Another member, ‘Woo-hyun,’ twice extorted money from the main victim of this case, ‘Do-yeon.’ And both ‘Ho-won’ and ‘Myung-soo’ threated their juniors to hand over money. Myung-soo also instigated an assault on their juniors, when one day he collected all of them together, including Do-yeon, and said:

Since you are all clueless ² then who is going to be the scapegoat of the group to be beaten?

Do-yeon volunteered to play the role of the scapegoat. Myung-soo then used a bat and hit her, and also used a decorative knife to hit her multiple times around the hip region. He also hit her once in the chest. Like an Army Sergeant, he then ordered three of these juniors to lie down, in the push-up position, and kicked their stomachs five times.

In regards to the assault case that led to Yoon-a’s detention, she asked Myung-soo to help her ‘fix’ the behaviour of Do-yeon because she had been rude to Yoon-a and had—in an act of ‘twet-dam-hwa’ or backstabbing—said derogatory things about her to others. On the way home after class one day, Yoon-a ordered six 1st grade juniors, including Do-yeon, to follow them to an empty underground parking lot. Like an Army Sergeant, she ordered them to stand in a line (like soldiers) and, on her behalf, her il-jin friends hit their juniors’ head and chest with their closed fists. Later on, Yoon-a asked her fellow group members to hit these juniors after they were ‘not polite enough’ to her. After the third time they were taken to the parking lot and put in a line and beaten, Do-yeon reported them to the police. Leader Sung-kyu figured out that it was Do-yeon who had ‘squealed’ on them, and so took her to a male toilet at school and pocked her thighs with chopsticks; while another member acted as lookout to make sure the coast was clear of authority figures.

‘We didn’t hit them seriously. We didn’t leave any bruises or injuries,’ Yoon-a said in her defence. She subsequently apologised to Do-yeon and, according to Yoon-a, they were, surprisingly, said to then ‘get along well.’ Asked to write what she thinks constitutes a ‘real friendship,’ Yoon-a wrote:

Real friends lead friends in the right direction. They never let them do bad behaviour, and are someone who can help each other when they are having trouble.

The Case of Mi-young

Unlike Yoon-a, ‘Mi-young’ had faced prior police investigations for juvenile offending, including:

1.

June, 2010. Joint Assault.

2.

January, 2012. Joint Assault.

3.

March, 2012. Special Burglary.

4.

March, 2012. Assault and Special Burglary.

5.

May, 2012. Special Burglary.

6.

May, 2012. Joint Assault and Confinement.³

The joint assault and confinement charge that led to her most recent detention occurred after Mi-young ran away from home and was living with her boyfriend, ‘Ji-yong,’ and ‘Chae-rin,’ a female acquaintance who had also run away from home. Chae-rin was alleged to have taken 100,000 won from Mi-young. Mi-young, Ji-yong, and a female accomplice named ‘Min-zee’ confronted Chae-rin and told her to return the money, ‘or else.’ Mi-young became angry after Chae-rin did not reply to this demand and reacted vengefully by pulling her hair and slapping her face three times with her right hand. Then with her right foot she stomped on Chae-rin’s face three times. Ji-yong, meanwhile, threw a roll of toilet paper at her face, hit her on the cheek eight times with his left hand, hit the back of her head, and stomped on her stomach and thighs. Min-zee then pulled her hair and kicked her. After assaulting her, they told Chae-rin she could not leave the apartment until she had paid back the money. To prevent her from leaving they slept in front of the entrance of the tiny apartment. And when they went out they took her with them. The total time of confinement was 44 hours and 40 minutes.

Like Yoon-a, Mi-young was asked to answer the question ‘What do you think is a real friendship?’ ‘If a friend does something wrong,’ wrote Mi-young, ‘I will lead her on the right path.’

Contrary to the allegations against her, Mi-young claimed she originally told Chae-rin that she did not need to pay her back the 100,000 won. Mi-young claimed Chae-rin then swore at her and so Mi-young reacted angrily by hitting her (stopping only after Chae-rin’s nose began to bleed). ‘The victim kept bothering me’, wrote Mi-young of her motivation and her seeming lack of self-control. ‘I couldn’t bear it anymore so I committed the delinquency.’

Mi-young also denied the confinement charge, claiming Chae-rin stayed at the apartment of her own free will. She also denied the delinquency related to her other cases, claiming that she was living with her boyfriend and thus her delinquent behaviour was simply the result of having to survive on the street. The classification officer who classified, examined, and analysed Mi-young’s case was of the opinion that she ‘lacks awareness’ about the true nature of her delinquency.

The Case of Myung-bo

‘Myung-bo’ was sent to the Detention Centre after being charged with extortion, assault, and threatening with an accomplice (a more severe charge than threatening someone on your own). To help finance their life on the street, Myung-bo and his two close friends would use the Cyworld SNS messenger service to ‘ask’ juniors to give them money. They would tell their juniors things like: ‘I need money to fix my motorbike.’ If these juniors replied that they did not have money to hand over they would be ordered to ask their juniors to give them money. If no money was provided, either by their juniors or their junior’s-juniors, they would be threatened and assaulted, which included hitting and kicking them in the chest, stomach, and thigh. Through this technique they acquired money on 19 separate occasions, totalling 73,000 won (on average, just 3,842 won per occasion). On two occasions Myung-bo acted ‘out of character’ for his contemporaries by threatening one of the boys by himself.

One way to conceptualize this junior-senior distinction—or power imbalance between students—is to reference a scene in the film ‘Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.’ In the scene Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi Wan Kanobi, and Jar Jar Binks are travelling through the Naboo Ocean when a large fish attacks their submarine-like ship. As this large fish is about to swallow the ship, the fish is suddenly eaten by an even bigger fish. Gui-Gon (played by Liam Neeson) responds by saying: ‘There’s always a bigger fish.’ That is, in one context a person is a senior to the junior below him/her, but in another context he/she is the junior to the senior above him/her. All, however, prefer being a senior, or the bigger fish. They live, after all, in a ‘junior vs. senior society’ caught, or transitioning, between its (closed) hierarchical Confucian and patriarchal ‘solid’ past, whose shadow-side engenders exploitation and inequality, and a (globally open) competitive consumerist ‘liquid’ present where behind the glossy and hypnotic wave of K-pop cultural production resides exclusion and moral indifference (see Chapters 2 and 4). Cue the middle-class residents of an apartment complex in the southern city of Busan, whose representative ordered the low-paid elderly male security guards to greet and bow to all the residents as they went to work and school in the mornings.⁴

The motivation for Myung-bo to intimidate, assault, and extort from his juniors was interpreted by his classification officer to have been set in motion when Myung-bo dropped out of school and then ran away from home. Due to not having sufficient allowance from his parents, yet finding himself living on the street and seeking out stimulation and entertainment, then his delinquency was considered ‘spontaneous’—a reaction to circumstances. The other important motivating factor was his friends, who came from the same neighbourhood and who he would periodically run away from home with. They shared in the delinquency by encouraging and influencing each other to obtain money from their juniors. Like all those placed under ‘classification and examination,’ Myung-bo was asked what he thought a real friendship should be. ‘A real friend’, Myung-bo wrote in his diary, ‘is someone who makes me stop before I do something bad.’ Sometimes, perhaps often, we can observe a disconnection between what one says and how one acts.

The Case of Tae-young

At the time of his arrival at the Detention Center ‘Tae-young’ had been investigated for three separate violent incidents:

1.

May, 2012. Intimidation

2.

January, 2013. Assault, Intimidation, and Extortion

3.

March, 2013. Assault and Damaging Public Property

One evening, Tae-young was with two of his juniors in the neighbourhood playground. He forced them to drink alcohol and one subsequently vomited on Tae-young’s clothes. This incited Tae-young’s anger and he reacted vengefully by hitting this junior in the face several times, severely wounding him. A few weeks later, at a different playground in the same neighbourhood with different juniors, he asked one of them to go to a nightclub with him. After refusing, Tae-young punched him repeatedly in the face. He then extorted 20,000 won from another junior and used the money to buy soju. He then got drunk and assaulted them for ‘talking back’ while he was telling them a joke.

Tae-young, however, is far from alone in acting violently whilst drunk. According to data from the Gyeonggi Provincial Police Agency, 70 % of those arrested on sexual and domestic violence charges in the province in 2014 were drunk at the time the crime occurred.⁵ Likewise, a survey of 4,851 individuals arrested for violent crimes in 2014 found that 73.1 % of those arrested for domestic abuse and 67.9 % of those arrested for sexual crimes committed their offenses while under the influence of alcohol.⁶ And alcohol-influenced violence has a very long and recurring history in South Korea. According to a historian, a ‘large percentage’ of criminal cases at the village level during the Joseon period (1392 CE to 1897 CE) were caused by ‘drunkenness.’⁷

Closely related to Tae-young’s abusive conduct is the case of the ‘normal’ first-year female university student who fell unconscious after drinking alcohol during a school-organized orientation session for newly enrolled students. A journalist reporting on this case said the following about the cultural dynamics at play when seniors force juniors to drink:

Excessive—often times forced—alcohol intake during university freshman orientation sessions in Korea have resulted in previous incidents, including deaths. It is common practice for senior students to force the newly enrolled to drink in order to ‘teach the newbie how to behave,’ meaning they have to drink if seniors order them to.⁸

The Case of Chong-guk

Prior to his detention, ‘Chong-guk’ had neither a criminal record nor any prior investigations. Unlike his peers at the Detention Centre, Chong-guk said he had no experience with running away, drinking, smoking, drug taking, sex, or self-harming, largely because he had, unlike his new roommates, a ‘narrow friendship circle.’ While Chong-guk (and his overprotective parents) considered himself to be a non-troublesome student, he was, nevertheless, charged with assault, intimidation, and extortion after his victim committed suicide.

The day before committing suicide the victim was in class but not concentrating, so Chong-guk said he simply ‘tickled’ him. The victim, who their teacher said was ‘weak,’ ‘vulnerable,’ and suffering from depression, reacted by pretending to try to jump out of the window. Chong-guk told police that because of this he was held responsible for the subsequent suicide. While other students were involved in bullying the victim, Chong-guk’s teacher, who was sympathetic to Chong-guk’s situation, said the other students pinpointed Chong-guk as the main offender partly to evade their own responsibility. This was achieved because Chong-guk was the only one who hung out with the victim, whom he saw as his ‘inferior’ and as someone he could ‘exploit.’ This exploitation, Chong-guk’s classmates told police, included Chong-guk swearing at the victim, slapping his buttocks, hitting him on the shoulder, and kicking him. It was said that between April and June of 2013 Chong-guk treated the victim in this way two to three times a week. In addition to the physical abuse, he intimidated the victim by asking him to ‘lend’ Chong-guk 1,000 won to buy school stationary. When the victim said he had no money, Chong-guk would swear at him.

Yet according to Chong-guk, what he did to his victim was just ‘normal behaviour between boys.’ Sometimes he hit him because, as class leader, he was trying to give him some ‘encouragement.’ He also said he simply ‘borrowed’ the money because he had forgotten to bring his own stationary. After placing emphasis upon his prior bullying victimization, Chong-guk was asked whether he sought to resolve being bullied in the 5th grade by seeking to bully someone weaker than himself. ‘Yes,’ was his response. Chong-guk’s classification officer was of the belief that his experience of being bullied—which included some ‘il-jin’ boys taking his belongings and occasionally assaulting him—provided the opportunity for him to learn delinquency. And once he obtained some authority and power after becoming the class leader, he could exploit students who were ‘weaker’ than him to help him resolve his own feeling of being victimised.

The Kimchi Cycle of Bullying and Violence

This component of Chong-guk’s conduct is significant, as it reveals the cyclical process whereby the victim becomes the offender, and then, in another way, becomes a victim again (and so on). This gets at the dynamic interplay between domination-and-submission that lies at the heart of bullying (and, by extension, South Korean culture). To better conceptualize the overlap between offender and victim—and, more importantly, the existence of the so-called ‘bully-victim’—I propose using the term ‘kimchi cycle of bullying-and-violence’ as a way to visualize, emphasize, and understand the cyclical nature of the life of those called ‘il-jin’ (perpetrators of school violence) and ‘wang-tta’ (victims of school violence). This overlap between perpetrator and victim is important because, as a number of studies have discovered, bully-victims tend to be more troubled than ‘pure bullies,’ tend to bully more severely, and are more likely to commit major acts of violence against other kids.⁹ In one study, bully-victims reported the greatest lack of faith in human nature and scored the highest on overall ‘Machiavellianism.’ Another study found that bully-victims were much more likely to endorse cheating than were other kids.¹⁰

Until the Sewol Ferry tragedy in April 2014, in which school students were its main victims, school violence-and-bullying was at the top of the agenda of social problems requiring immediate and effective solutions. Most importantly, the issue of school violence was brought into the centrepiece of the Park Geun-hye’s administration’s criminal justice policy after it was designated—along with 1) domestic violence, 2) sexual violence, and 3) food-related crimes—one of the four ‘social evils’ the government promised (but failed) to quickly ‘eradicate’ from South Korean society (see Chapter 4). Consequently, ‘school violence’ (학교폭력)—a misleading term as the ‘deep roots’ of the violence perpetrated in schools both precede and exceed the school gates—became largely framed in a binary fashion, with ‘socially evil’ students (‘il-jin’) pitted against innocent victims (‘wang-tta’). During this ‘moral panic’ over violent students, itself a cyclical feature of modern South Korean society (see Chapter 1), the discourse on school violence has suffered from an over-emphasis upon the victims, leaving a lack of understanding about those initiating the violence. While this emphasis upon the victims is to be expected, even applauded, this has, nevertheless, resulted in a somewhat one-sided or clouded picture. As noted by David Farrington, the world’s leading authority on juvenile offending, bullying (like criminal offending) arises from interactions between potential offenders and potential victims in environments that provide opportunities.¹¹ As is now generally agreed, bullying is a relational problem (requiring relationship solutions).¹² If we wish to ‘eradicate’ school violence then, arguably, it is vitally important to more clearly understand the existence of those creating the trouble in the first place. ‘How important it is,’ Pope Francis said during his ‘rock star’ visit to the deeply Christian nation of South Korea in August 2014, ‘that the voice of every member of society be heard, and that a spirit of open communication, dialogue, and cooperation be fostered.’¹³

Thus while it is understandable to ask the following question to adolescents who cause trouble; harm others; and violate social, moral, and legal norms: ‘What is wrong with you?’, a more important question we need to answer is: ‘What has happened to you?’¹⁴ This requires understanding the deviant life, home life, school life, social life, and psychological life of these (troubled) trouble-makers.

Taking into account the social and cultural context in which boys and girls, and men and women, act and react requires cultivating what C. Wright Mills famously called ‘the sociological imagination.’¹⁵ For Mills, exercising the sociological imagination requires narrating—much like novels that captivate and journalism that resonates—what is happening to people, including what they feel, what they fear, and what they aspire to. If done properly, the sociological imagination can develop an account of the historical epoch individuals are living in and living through. Such an account can then help both private individuals and public citizens better understand the meaning of their historically lived experience. Quite simply, the sociological imagination is a useful tool as it is able to offer narratives—or ‘thick descriptions’¹⁶—that connect epoch with experience (and experience with epoch).¹⁷ This book is an attempt to cultivate a sociological imagination.

In addition to calling upon South Koreans, 29 % of whom are said to be Christian,¹⁸ to reject the seductive allure of ‘inhumane materialistic economic models’ that ‘damage people’s integrity’ and that ‘create new forms of poverty’ and ‘oppress authentic spiritual and cultural values,’¹⁹ Pope Francis also told an attentive South Korean public that open minds and empathy are necessary for authentic dialogue. ‘We are challenged,’ the Pope told more than 50,000 participants on ‘Asia Youth Day,’ ‘to listen not only to the words which others speak, but to the unspoken communication of their experiences, their hopes and aspirations, their struggles and their deepest concerns.’²⁰

In order to gain a deeper contextual and developmental understanding of these makers-of-trouble, Chapter 5 presents and analyses 20 case-files of ‘juvenile delinquents,’ including those of Yoon-a, Mi-young, Myung-bo, Tae-young, and Chong-guk (not their real names). These 11 males and 9 females, aged between 14 and 18, had all been sent, sometime between 2011–2013, to the Juvenile Detention Center by either the Family Court or the Juvenile Court on school violence-related charges. The focus in this book on ‘cases’ is designed to move beyond the ‘thin description’ of the lives of those involved in bullying and violence offered in questionnaire-based quantitative research that dominates the academic field in South Korea and beyond. More broadly, when seeking to interpret social life and human behaviour, social scientists in South Korea predominantly, seemingly exclusively, reach for the quantitative-based survey method. And in trying to contextualize these survey results, these professional thinkers, labouring in what we could call a ‘society of surveys,’ are inclined to compare survey findings with The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data. To count and compare seems to be the modus operandi. As a way to contextualize the epoch of those involved in bullying and violence, this tradition is, cautiously, even suspiciously, continued here by way of reference to a multitude of survey data that has appeared. Nevertheless, the goal is to leave as much flesh on the bone as possible so that the reader gains a more holistic understanding of South Korea’s young (troubled) makers-of-trouble—and of the society within which they live. In this sense, this book is not so much a ‘case study’ of bullying and violence in South Korean society, but more like a ‘study of cases.’ However, since one central goal of the book is to place such cases within an ecological and developmental context, then this Introduction shifts gears to focus upon how South Korean children and adolescents, in general, perceive and experience the society in which they all are growing up.

The assumption regarding the term ‘school violence’ is that the violence is largely confined to school, but the institution of school is—as Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems approach shows²¹ —part of all the other ‘nested structures’ of society (e.g., home, work, military, shopping mall, concert hall). And like kimchi, bullying and violence is ubiquitous, as it is stitched into the everyday fabric of all aspects of South Korean society. As will be shown (see Chapter 3), bullying behaviour (like kimchi) is present throughout the social structure and embedded within the culture and interpersonal relations. Yet one side effect of this recent public and political attention on violence and bullying in schools has been a lack of proper recognition of the violence and bullying taking place throughout South Korean society that speaks to deeper historical, cultural, and social dynamics at play. In particular, the dynamics include the issues of hierarchy and authority deeply rooted in Confucian ethics and social relations—and individualization and exclusion deeply rooted in the ethics of a consumerist society.

According to a Doctor at the World Kimchi Institute, ‘Kimchi is symbolic of Korea’ as it can be seen on every meal table throughout the day. Koreans, both North and South, have been exposed to it from a young age and thus it is considered part of the identity of every Korean.²² Materially, kimchi is principally made up of white cabbage, chilli, salt, sugar, fish sauce, garlic, ginger, and onion. Metaphorically, however, the layers of cabbage may symbolize individuals enmeshed in (bi-directional) interpersonal relations with each other, with the sugar symbolizing the ‘sweet happy events’ they experience, the salt and fish sauce the ‘sharp bitter’ experiences, the onion and garlic signifying ‘pungent antagonistic’ experiences, and, finally, the chilli as a symbol for ‘violent energy.’ In this sense, this book is a story about the ‘fire’ that burns in the heart of South Korean society.

South Korea Is a ……… Society, Because ….….

Next to the 20 teenagers in the case-file material, who are considered ‘losers’ in the eyes of the education system and in South Korean society more generally, we can place the slightly older 20 female undergraduate students at Ewha Womans University, whom I asked, at the beginning of one of my classes, to fill in the blanks of the following sentence: ‘South Korea is a………society, because……… ’

Like the South Korean society depicted in the suicide notes mentioned in Chapter 2, these ‘high academic performers,’ considered to be ‘winners’ academically and the future drivers of South Korea’s ‘creative economy,’ present a picture of a dark, dehumanizing, and unforgiving (liquid) society. Here are eight of their depictions written to describe a society the discontented younger generation began to label, in the middle of 2015, ‘Hell Joseon’ (see Chapter 2):

South Korea is an unhappy society, because there is a high rate of death and people don’t know what they really want. It seems that money is the only standard of life.

South Korea is an unstable society, because everyone in this society always feels uncomfortable and has a worrying feeling about their status, future, and career.

South Korea is an unreliable society, because the gap between the rich and the poor is widening, and people don’t believe the government and politicians. In addition, the population is aging but the welfare system is poor.

South Korea is a competitive society that is in a race, because most people are so busy with their lives, trying to get what most people actually can’t get.

South Korea is a speedy society, because everything fades or changes so fast and as people always act like they don’t have enough time, they are always in a hurry about everything.

South Korea is a superficial society, because most people focus on what you have and what you look like, rather than on who you are.

South Korea is a patriarchal society, because of the numerous cosmetic surgery hospitals, hair salons, cosmetic shops, etc. It’s like women are expected and unconsciously pressurized by society into dolling herself up for the gaze of men and the public.

South Korea is a two-faced society, because on the outside it may look like a warm country, but actually it is full of competition and people are always in a hurry and not always the nicest people on earth.

Taken together, for these young women South Korean society is:

unhappy, unstable, unreliable, divided, quantitative, comparative, competitive, conflict-ridden, ideological, patriarchal, speedy, moving, salty, superficial, two-faced, and an endless marathon.

Hardly the words to be used in ad campaigns to lure medical tourists and foreign K-pop fans as the government pinpoints ‘culture’ as the new economic growth engine.²³

Let the Children Speak

Besides university students, we may ask: What do South Korea’s elementary school students think about their society? In 2014, 23 5th and 6th grade elementary school students were recruited by Child Fund Korea to become ‘young researchers,’ whereupon they interviewed 100 of their fellow peers living in Seoul and Chungju about their lives. As the title of their subsequent report states, this was an opportunity to let ‘Korean Children Speak’ (for and about themselves). What they discovered, as stated in the report’s sad subtitle, was: ‘Korean children are unhappy because of their studies.’ The ‘slave-like study habits’ they were subjected to, and their ‘really strict lives’ that were revealed through their report, were encapsulated in the daily schedule described by one student in the 6th year of elementary school living in Seoul’s affluent Gangnam district:

Go to sleep at 2:30 am and get up at 7:00 am. Get to school at 8:00 am and get home at 3:00 pm. Study for three more hours at the English institute and have dinner. Study at the math academy until 10:00 pm. Go home and do the homework for the English and math institutes, practice piano, and study Chinese characters and Chinese language until 2:30 am.²⁴

On average, these children went to bed at 12:09 am and got up at 6:52 am, getting, in total, just six hours and 43 minutes of sleep. As noted, this amount of sleep fell far short of the 9–10 hours the Korean Sleep Research Society recommends children of that age should get each night.

In trying to make sense of the ‘exhausting academic pressure’ they faced, and their severely restricted leisure time, the children were asked: ‘Why do you study?’ While 40 % said they studied to develop their talents, more than half (52.7 %) said they studied to help them get into university and to find a job. More disconcerting, almost one-third (31.8 %) said their studying habits were motivated by a fear of becoming a ‘failure’ in life. In the conclusion to their report, the children wrote the following appeal to the adults in their world whose actions reproduce this environment:

Children need to be provided with opportunities for self-actualization and personal development so that they can understand the purposes and reasons for studying. They should be provided with adequate time for sleep and for leisure activities.²⁵

This ‘Korean Children Speak’ report came on the heels of the publication of the results of the 2013 ‘Comprehensive Survey of Children in Korea.’ This survey sought to understand the quality of life of South Korean children, by getting the children themselves to subjectively assess their satisfaction with life. With a combined score of 60.3 out of 100, their level of life satisfaction was lower than any other country in the OECD.²⁶ The primary reason for this low quality of life was attributed to ‘extreme academic stress.’ This academic pressure, resulting from an excessive amount of homework and tests, and high expectations toward school grades, was also flagged as being responsible for year-on-year increases in their stress levels. While high parental expectation of children’s educational attainment has been found to ‘strongly predict’ successful academic achievement in Asian cultures,²⁷ the other side of this coin reveals that such high expectations increase the risk for depression in adolescents and, more generally, partly explains why South Korean adolescents are among the least happy in all OECD countries.²⁸

As shown elsewhere, stress produced by severe academic pressure helps to explain why South Korea has the unwelcome distinction of consistently having the highest adolescent suicide rate among all OECD countries (which almost doubled between 2001 and 2013). While one survey found that 11 % percent of the teenagers surveyed claimed to have had contemplated suicide in 2012,²⁹ a survey conducted in 2014 found that just over half of South Korean teenagers had suicidal thoughts that year, with nearly one in three saying they had felt ‘very depressed.’³⁰ And for 40 % of the 37 % of secondary students who claimed to have had suicidal thoughts in 2013, such thoughts were due to stress from ‘poor grades.’³¹ One side effect of decreasing life satisfaction is a concurrent increase in ‘child deprivation.’ With a score of 58.4 % in the ‘Child Deprivation Index,’ which seeks to measure children’s nutritional intake and their leisure activities, South Korean children also had the unwelcome distinction of having the third lowest score in the OECD (ahead only of Hungary and Portugal). What the children felt most deprived of was adequate leisure and family time.³² ‘From the moment a child starts to toddle, writes a researcher with the South Korean chapter of the Human Rights Monitor, he or she is deprived of basic liberties such as free will, self-determination and the pursuit of happiness due to exhaustive expectations, repressive education, tiring competition and even physical abuse.’³³ These are hardly the conditions to prevent juvenile delinquency. Or put another way, it is surprising that bullying and school violence is not more widespread.

Since, for about three out of four students, it is predominately after-school private academies (hagwon) that eat into a student’s leisure and family time, it is unsurprising that another survey found that, for the 5th and 6th grade elementary students who were questioned, their biggest source of stress was having to attend these private lessons. But while 51.2 % cited after-school academies as their major source of stress, 48.4 % cited ‘academic achievement.’ In addition (since the survey allowed for multiple answers), one in five claimed they were most stressed about being ostracised or excluded, while 15.8 % felt most stressed about their personal appearance. A mere 3.5 % said they actually enjoyed attending the academies.³⁴

In her poem ‘The Day I Hate Going to the Academy,’ a budding 10-year-old poet—herself the daughter of a poet—expressed, using graphic imagery, the negative feelings that arise from being sent to a private academy by her mother:

When I don’t want to go to the academy / Just like this /

Chew on Mom / Boil her, bake her / Eat her eyes up /

Pull out her teeth / Rip off her hair / Turn her into sliced meat /

If she cries, lick her tears /

Keep her heart for the last course /

It’s most painful that way.³⁵

Accompanying the poem was an illustration of a girl eating a heart while covered in blood. Since, read literally, she implies that her mother’s body parts should be boiled and eaten as punishment for forcing her to attend private after-school classes, the poem stirred public controversy, especially among mothers. To soothe moral condemnation the publisher recalled the book and promised to destroy all copies. Yet six months later the book reappeared on book shelves, with the above poem reluctantly removed and replaced with a blank page.³⁶ ‘Gone but not forgotten’ seemed to be the message from the young poet and her supportive mother.

Poetry has also been used as a therapeutic tool at the ‘Seoul Juvenile Training School,’ a male correctional facility just outside Seoul where adolescents like Myung-bo, Tae-young, and Chong-guk are sent from the Detention Center to be educated, disciplined, and (hopefully) reformed. As part of a ‘poetry therapy’ volunteer program, a number of female poets volunteered their time to teach a group of teenage boys how to write poetry, in the hope that they would be able to find an expressive outlet for the myriad of feelings and emotions buried deep inside themselves—especially their feelings about their fraught relations with their parents. ‘Speedy Hyeon’ wrote the following poem, titled ‘Father,’ to express the feelings he had towards his father:

My father hated me

Though the memory is vague for I was young

I was brought up strong

I am eighteen

And I am in a reform school

My devil-like father

Who I hated the most when I was young

Has now become

My one and only angel.

He brought me up so strong

He shed tears for me

Blaming himself

I still cannot forget

The tears of my father.³⁷

‘Tall Bu-yeon’ also wrote a poem he titled ‘Father’:

When I was young my father was scary and strict

Now time has passed and as I know the world

No longer is there a strict and scary father

But only an old and weak father

Always scared of him

Now I can only see his lonely back.

Living in the Shadows

This book is not a story about that very real side of South Korean society that is safe, peaceful, respectful, compassionate, moral, honourable, and admirable. It is not about the warm and loving parents, the kind and caring teachers, and the compassionate and supportive employers. While this humanistic and prosocial side of South Korean society should always be kept at the forefront of our mind—as it functions as a ‘protective factor’ to help ‘contain’ more widespread bullying and violence—this is a story about the shadowy side of life in South Korea. This is an important side of the story to tell about contemporary South Korean society as no society can fully understand itself without looking at its shadow side —its darkness.³⁸ And darkness, as Martin Luther King, Jr. (and Star Wars) reminded us, can only be driven out with light, not more darkness.

‘I feel as though I am at the edge of the cliff,’ said Kon-u, a high school student and victim of school bullying, ‘because I am not going to socialize with people during my lifetime.’³⁹ After being a victim of school violence Kon-u was said to have become a ‘self-wang-tta’; meaning he withdrew from others and just spent time alone. Although he gained ‘satisfaction’ from taking photos of other people mingling together, he said ‘I feel very uncomfortable with other kids.’ As part of a documentary on school violence (which is mentioned throughout the book), Kon-u’s school agreed to allow its first year classes to undertake a ‘Classroom Peace Project.’ The documentary sent out requests to schools asking if they would be in interested in participating in the project, but they all rejected their offer. Some schools denied they had a problem with school violence, while one school asked them accusingly ‘Who said we had school violence?’ Another school said they had to see how such participation would be able to ‘promote’ their school. In short, the schools were either concerned about their image and ‘honour’ or wished the school’s problems would remain hidden. Thus they did not welcome a TV program poking around exposing the dark side of the school. ‘I also thought about the negative factors that might not make us look good,’ said the principal of Kon-u’s High School, ‘but if we find such problems we can fix them and make a better school.’ The problem of school violence, the principal argued, is not simply an individual problem, but is principally a relationship problem.

Unsurprisingly, the socially withdrawn Kon-u initially did not want to play any part in the project, but during the ‘unity activity’ he became more engaged, even volunteering to say something. He mustered up the courage to tell his classmates:

If something happens to one of us, like someone becoming sick, we can take care of them, but a knife is doubled-edged, it can help and it can hurt. I want only the good side of the knife.

Kon-u’s teacher responded by adding:

The mouth is also like a knife in that it can say good things and bad things, so we should try and use it in a nice way.

More broadly, we may say that South Korean society and culture is doubled-edged like a knife: It can be used to carve and shape fine human beings, yet, at the same time, can also be used to slice and dice people apart.

To include and empower or to exclude and damage? That is the question.

Structure of the Book

The book is divided into five chapters: 1. The Initial Spark, 2. The Fuel, 3. The Fire, 4. The Explosion, 5. The Aftermath/Damage.

These headings were taken from a website’s analysis of a famous bullying incident that occurred in the K-pop world (and which is analysed in Chapter 2). These headings underline the way the book unfolds in a processual way. The ‘The Initial Spark’ begins with the case which ignited the current concern about the topic under study, then examines the various cases that quickly followed before focusing on the historical developments of school violence. In ‘The Fuel’ the emphasis shifts from history to the way culture ‘fuels’ bullying and violence. That is, we cannot talk about school violence without taking South Korean culture into account. In ‘The Fire’ the issue of culture in general is more specifically centred upon the culture of and social relations within the workplace. From labour, the book then moves into the realm of politics, with ‘The Explosion’ highlighting the case which ‘exploded’ into the political realm and the way in which authority figures have responded to the problem of bullying and violence. At this point the book has tried to place the issue of bullying and violence in its contemporary, historical, cultural, economic, and political context, as it has gradually shifted in emphasis from bullying and violence at school to the wider society and back again. This particular structure is itself in accord with the ‘cyclical’ view put forward of bullying and violence. This then sets up the final chapter, which centres upon interpersonal relations and seeks to answer the central question posed at the beginning of the next chapter: ‘How can young people do such cruel and violent things to each other ?’

References

Alcohol blamed