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I'm writing about another cause for high divorce rates in South Korea. Violence against women in marriage (and outside it) remains unambiguously high. Not just in South Korea, mind you. This column discusses South Korea. Why do women divorce? Tragically, they must run for their lives! Too many women suffer physical and mental abuse at the hands of other men, including their husbands. It gives me no pleasure to write about it, but it's one of the leading causes of trouble in Korean marriages and families.
It's all readily available. Wikipedia reports a high number of abuse cases, with many more unreported. Many men face conviction, and many repeat the offenses. The domestic violence in South Korea page points out patriarchy and alcohol use as causes, but that's an incomplete list. Too many marry too soon, and the husband (and if working, the wife's) careers create great time constraints on a family. In the tinderboxes created by aspiring couples, stress is a major cause, as men displace their workplace and other frustrations on wives and children.
There are clear signs domestic violence transfers to the younger generation. A 2017 Daily Telegraph story suggests nearly 80 percent of Korean males surveyed had physically or mentally abused a girlfriend. The abuse included forced isolation from public activity, friends and family members as well as acts of physical violence.
In February 2018, Statista.com reported South Koreans considered domestic abuse against women and girls the number one social issue. Violence sells and demands attention, also showing a deeper social and cultural weakness, and threat. Westerners speak of an absence of equality under the law. I suspect South Koreans, in particular feminists, might call it the failure of a male-dominated society. I call it a need for renewal of common self-development based on respect. This fund of social respect includes legal and moral aspects.
I agree with Se-woong Koo's 2016 opinion column in the New York Times. It pointed to an old idea, in the form of a law that South Korea's advanced society and male-led legislature appears continually afraid to accept: the nondiscrimination bill. President Moon Jae-in, leaders of both major political parties, the leaders of conglomerates, and all hardworking husbands show a systematic blindness to this key need. South Koreans don't have the North's totalitarian autocracy. Yet the same violence and unjust treatment of women occurs daily.
The 21st century needs a further cultural awakening in advanced nations on the limits of growth without gender equality. Violence against women and girls must rank at the top of social evils retarding further progress. Each day the limits of current social and political conditions reveal themselves. There are few hours left to wring from a workday. Young adults struggle to find good jobs, and today's generation faces a lower standard of living than their parents. Falling fertility and birthrates, rising divorces, and family violence have become the sad faces of a "new normal" monstrous in its abnormality. South Koreans must demand a stop to this train running through serial wrecks.
Feminists will recoil at the notion of revitalizing Confucian thinking in present-day flower. The flower is nondiscrimination within the Korean cultural ethos. Women and men, girls and boys, deserve equal respect, equal opportunity for education and public lives, and equal time for leisure. Equality mayn't look the same across any two societies in its expression. That's never the point. Equality is the cousin of freedom in the soul of democracy.
President Moon wants to do something for the ages. He's slowly realizing the sad truth it won't be Korean reunification with the self-made megalomaniac Kim Jong-un. He's even slower to see human rights as his horizon for Korean greatness and a presidential legacy. I'm afraid it's too late for him. Non-discrimination against women and girls awaits a leadership for the ages. Which Korean leaders will show themselves to inherit the cries of the discomfort women, teens and girls in our midst?
"Gender equality" shouldn't remain a second- or third-tier ministry and a series of legislative palliatives. The same pathetic disequilibrium will persist and deepen. In South Korea and elsewhere, men and women diminish the stock of happiness and happy lives as well as social and cultural potential by inaction. What are South Koreans waiting for? There's no better way to advance the cause of democracy and freedom in Asia and elsewhere this century than beginning at home, in Korean homes.
Bernard Rowan (browan10@yahoo.com) is associate provost for contract administration and professor of political science at Chicago State University. He is a past fellow of the Korea Foundation and former visiting professor at Hanyang University.
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