TEACHER'S NOTES: Sex Education in Korea- An Alarming Trend Update

I keep updated on "current events" for my advanced university students, and one of the debate topics in the Korean controversy-centered book I use is obscenity/pornography laws in Korea. This was something I was not too well-versed in as it pertained to Korea when I first began to teach. I had to do quite a bit of research in order to keep up with my students, who took the topic and ran with it. Obviously, they had more access to Korean articles, and it turned out to be a more complex issue than I (and most of the students) had thought. Keep in mind that many (though certainly not all) Korean university students are a bit more "innocent" than their American counterparts. A recent article in the JoognAng Daily News, the most "liberal" newspaper in Korea, sheds some light on the issue, and exposes an alarming trend.

In my first year in Korea, I came across an article on sex-education from 2003, and found that there was very little to no sex education in the schools. According to the more recent article, nothing has changed much. Here are some highlights from the article:

A slew of sex crimes committed by teens in recent years has raised public awareness and anxiety about the quality of sex education provided by schools. Five months ago a case in Gapyeong, Gyeonggi shocked the entire country when police revealed that six middle school students had repeatedly raped a 14-year-old female classmate over a period of two months. Adding to the public’s dismay was the fact the boys showed little remorse and did not seem to understand the severity of their crimes. One boy claimed that he merely wanted to copy scenes from a pornographic film he’d seen on the Internet. In other words, many kids are now getting their sex education from triple-X porn sites rather than their parents, peers or teachers. [. . .]

According to National Police Agency data, one fourth of sex crimes involving teenage victims are perpetrated by teenagers and 13 percent of them involve preteen assailants. These numbers are much higher than in Japan and the United States, both countries that already have standardized sex education programs in their elementary, middle and high schools. According to statistics compiled by law enforcement agencies in the three countries, six out of100,000 teenagers in the United States committed rape in 2005. In Japan the figure was 1.1 out of 100,000 and in Korea it was 11.5. Korea’s incidence of teen rape is almost double that of the U.S and ten times that of Japan. Part of the problem is that Korea’s sex education programs have been stuck in the past and have not kept pace with the rapid development of Internet technology. We live in an age where adolescents are frequently exposed to sexually explicit material via the Web.

The Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development currently mandates 10 hours of sex education a year for every grade from elementary through high school. In reality, the ministry admits that in just under half of the 10,063 schools they surveyed these sessions are conducted for less than eight-hours.

“Most of the time, our gym teacher turns the sex-ed tape on and goes outside and then comes back in when the tape has ended. Meanwhile, we sit in class and make fun of the tape,” K said. This is partly due to the fact that sex education isn’t an independent subject. At present, sex ed material is loosely scattered around physical education or biology classes. In Japan, the required minimum of sex education is 70 hours per year; sex education is a separate subject. The United States has “health” classes, which include sex education, and these have been set apart as an independent subject since the start of the 20th century.

For the rest of the article: http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2879587

What are these crimes? Well, a later article summarizes:

A recent series of disturbing sex crimes committed by teenagers have worried and saddened many Koreans, because the rapists are shockingly young and some of the incidents took place in classrooms during school hours. These middle-school rapists showed little remorse for their acts, police and psychologist who questioned them said, with some of the young criminals viewing gang rape as part of growing up. Others, investigators say, are acting out scenes from pornographic movies they find on the Internet.

I can personally attest that even elementary students are left for long periods of time unsupervised. The Korean teachers leave the room during the ten minute breaks and go into the teacher's lounges. Many of them are themselves late coming back to class. To be fair, their is usually a class captain (responsible student), but children will be children...

The number of sexual crimes committed by teenage students has risen steadily, but an incident at a middle school in Gapyeong, Gyeonggi province, shocked the nation last month. Gapyeong police said six male students were accused of the serial rape of a female student over a two month period. The school only had 30 students in each class, and the offenders and the victim were classmates, police said. Of the six students, four were arrested for criminal investigation. According to the police, the nightmare for the 14-year-old victim began in January when one of her classmates sexually abused her. Using that incident as a point of vulnerability, the boy and his friends began raping her repeatedly. The police said the crimes all took place inside the school compound with as many as four boys raping her each time. The last episode took place on March 15. During lunch hour, three boys raped her in an empty classroom, the police said, adding that afterwards the offenders and the victim went back to class and finished the school day. The victim finally told a teacher about the abuse on March 21, and her parents were immediately notified.

The downside of group mentality is that, mixed with teenage hormones, teenagers can become a pack of wolves. In another city in the province, the girl was left unconscious, and apparently died from her injuries and/or the copious amounts of soju she was forced to drink that rendered her unconscious:

"[. . .]clearly these young boys appear to think gang rape is a new coming-of-age ceremony,” Lee Soo-jung, a criminal psychology professor with Kyonggi University, said. “When you closely follow the cases, you can see that their methods are the same. They pick one of their classmates and force her to drink soju. When she becomes unconscious, they rape her in turn,” Lee said. The pattern, Lee added, has spread among middle school boys because the teenagers “bragged about their experiences” at school and in Internet chat rooms.

For the full article: http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2874477

I don't honestly know quite what to make of this. I have observed Korean middle-schoolers at close range, and they appear to be (generally) even more psychologically vulnerable than their American peers. They are strongly kept under control by their culture; respect for teachers and elders is absolutely demanded, but to the point that if something bad happens, they literally have no one to talk to. The school system is pretty much akin to military school - school uniforms, the "middle school girl haircut" (to show she is underage), and harsh discipline.

Outside of school, the outstanding feature I have noticed (and I am not the only one) among middle-schoolers is the intensely physical same-sex friendships that develop. Some of this is cultural; same-sex adults are also very physical with each other (heck, they get naked in the jim jil bang/sauna together!), but not with the same intensity as I have noticed among middle- schoolers. I have observed adolescent boys sitting in each others' laps and cuddling, girls holding hands and stroking each others faces, long and intense staring into each others' eyes (both sexes), and other behaviors that make me well, frankly, uncomfortable. I do not believe this is intentionally homosexual behavior, but it does smell (sometimes literally) of "hornymones" going full blast. Many of them are still "innocent" enough not to understand why they are acting this way, but this innocence is what has perhaps led those poor girls from the article into the dangerous situation. It is pure biological urge untempered by understanding, in other words.

For the record, I do believe that American sex education is doing pretty well. I don't have a problem with teaching safe sex (only 12% of sexually active Korean men use condoms), biology, "just say no," and "alternative lifestyles." Although I am a practicing Christian, I am not an ostrich, and I believe in the world that we live in, it is important to know how to be safe by knowing what is out there. I think that basic health information needs to be passed on to Korean schoolchildren, as well as accountability. For all of the hullaballoo about America's sex education programs, I must say that in California (one of the more liberal states), they do a pretty good job of teaching accountability (as anyone who has had their class interrupted by "Baby-Think-It-Over's" crying can attest to). Abstinence is still taught as the only 100% "safe sex," but the other options are also taught as well. Knowledge is power, but only with accountability.