South Korea's Rape Culture
What do you do when there are too many criminals to jail?
Registration is open for the True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture conference this March at Notre Dame. I’m excited to be attending as a speaker, and I hope to see some of you there. I’ll be part of two panels: “Modern Heresies about Women” and “Embodying Cultures of Life.”
Additionally, I’m coordinating an open letter from pro-life supporters of PEPFAR. If you’d like to know more/sign on, you can do so here.
This week,
and I kicked off our Flowers of Fire book club for .
We’re discussing one of the book’s sections every week. Here’s a preview of our dialogue:
Leah: I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that rape, as we tend to understand it in America, was legal and understood to be legal in South Korea until the last few years. To legally be rape, women had to have faced “overwhelming violence or intimidation.” In some cases, courts conceded there was violence yet acquitted men of rape because, essentially, some hypothetical woman could have endured a degree of danger and pain in order to escape. If a woman lost her rape case, her abuser could sue her for false accusation and had an easier time convicting her.
So it wasn’t just a matter of making laws have teeth, but of changing the law and changing the expectations. And going from a “rape is legal” culture to one where rape is actually treated as serious and sociopathic is a hard shift to make in a few years. Not least because there are so many living, recent rapists!
Patrick: Right, the legal system in this section felt like a place where the gender revolution that was occuring in the country was especially incomplete. But that’s another place where the parallels break down between South Korea and the U.S. “Flowers of Fire” was only published in 2023, but it already feels out-of-step with the anti-woke moment we’re experiencing now. The overly-simplistic slogan of “believe all women” has evolved to a more complicated place, something beyond just dividing men and women. Just ask Blake Lively.
Jung recounts how a student’s poem alleging abuse leads to an 89-year-old literature professor having his poems taken out of textbooks and honors rescinded—without even ever having been named publicly, much less charged, by his alleged victim. Does it advance authentic justice to skip over due process, or let whisper campaigns dictate who is and isn’t worthy of public praise? Even the most well-justified popular revolutions are hard to keep from overcorrection, and as I think we will continue to explore, not all of the male backlash to South Korea’s #MeToo was entirely unjustified.
You can read our whole dialogue (and discussion questions) at Fairer Disputations. Over here, I want to drill in a little on the discussion question that got nixed for weirdness, but which I think my big question about the book:
What form could sex-relations-deBaathification*† take in an office or an industry where many many men had engaged in harassment or assault?
*debaathifcation was the term used during the Iraq War and its aftermath to describe the problem of trying to continue to run the government / civil service etc while purging it of the influence of members of Saddam’s Ba’ath party… who were, of course, the ones who knew how everything worked.
†it was not especially successful.
The situation of sexual relations described in Flowers of Fire is much, much worse than the broad situation in America over the same period of time. We have pockets of particular industries (e.g. Hollywood, the Armed Services) where harassment and rape may be assumed to go unpunished and unrebuked, but what Jung describes is so much more pervasive and public than what happens in the United States.
So the question is, what can the resolution be of a reckoning where there are too many rapists to lock up?
You can say (and folks can make the case in the comments) that maybe it would be better to jail/fire all the men you can establish evidence against—and the evidence won’t be impossible to come by, given the shamelessness of the abuse regime. But when it’s not a matter of a few particular predators, but of predation being the common culture… how do you come out on the other side?
The two things the book has strongly brought to mind for me are:
Truth and Reconciliation processes, intended (with varying success) to allow neighbors to live alongside each other after brutal, widespread victimization of one group by another.
- ’s review of Sick Societies (cw: detailed sexual abuse of both men and women). In the case of the Gusii people of western Kenya, who incorporated sexual humiliation into young men’s coming of age ceremonies, and taught women to physically resist sex as part of their wedding nights, “in 1950 there were so many convictions for rape that there were not enough prison facilities to hold the offenders.”
Even after extraordinary violence, it may be possible to slowly come to live alongside one another, and gradually build up trust with and forgiveness for your neighbor. But that titanic task seems even harder when you expect to need to marry one of your former persecutors in order to found a family.
The natural family is, ideally, a little platoon, a place of rest and resupply that prepares you to go out and do the hard work of making amends, building up new norms, offering forgiveness. But when the wound cuts cleanly through the smallest society, where do you go to prepare to rebuild?
I have no idea how to address things on a societal level, but you (and readers) might be interested in the 1976 film "Not a Pretty Picture." It's an experimental film where the director recreated the scene of her own rape, with her younger self played by a young woman who had also been raped as a teenager, and the film includes a lot of discussion by all of the actors about what they have been taught about rape. It's the 1970s so nobody has any idea what boundaries are, which means that the young actors of both sexes are really candid in describing the basically pro-rape things they still to some extent believe. They work through some of those beliefs on camera. Obviously an extremely grueling watch, but also an example of people seeking to unlearn the beliefs that make rape hard to prevent or combat.
Still waiting on my library hold, but the comparison that comes to mind is how many Christian denominations have had a big reckoning (or a need for a big reckoning…) in the past several years re: various abuses of power. By the time you remove egregious wrongdoers (if you can muster the institutional will to get that far) and those who publicly supported, concealed, and covered for them, you don’t have much of an institution left. Dunno if I have a hopeful takeaway on this one except, mostly, in the eschaton, of course.