Gangnam murder sparks frank discussion on misogyny in South Korea
Murder suspect admits he is misogynist
The man held on charges of murdering a 23-year-old woman told the police that the crime was motivated by his hatred for women.
The man is suspected of killing the victim, with whom he had no prior contact, in Gangnam on Tuesday night.
The suspect has since told the police that he committed the crime because he “hated women for belittling him.”
Seoul Seocho police said the victim had been drinking at a bar on the first floor of a four-story building located between Gangnam Subway Station (line No. 2) and Sinnonhyeon Subway Station (line No. 9). She was killed in the bathroom halfway up the staircase from the restaurant leading to a karaoke on the second floor.
The victim’s boyfriend discovered her bloodied body collapsed on the bathroom floor. She had been stabbed three to four times on the left side of her chest.
Based on the surveillance video, the police arrested a 34-year-old man surnamed Kim who worked as a part-time waiter at a nearby restaurant.
Kim was recorded entering the bathroom before the victim and nonchalantly leaving.
The police caught Kim as he turned up at the restaurant he works in, wearing the same clothes from the night before and with a 32.5 centimeter-length knife inside his pants pocket. The weapon was from the restaurant kitchen.
Kim admitted his crime and told the police that he did not personally know the victim but that he hated women for ignoring him. He said he took out the knife with malicious intentions.
The police are investigating whether he intended to sexually assault her.
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Gangnam murderer says he killed “because women have always ignored me”
Brutal murder in Gangnam washroom has touched off fervent response as an act of misogyny
“I did it because women have always ignored me.”
This quote by a 34-year-old surnamed Kim after his brutal random stabbing murder of a woman in her twenties in the middle of Seoul’s busy Gangnam neighborhood has triggered a major response in South Korea. On May 19, growing numbers of mourners came to pay respects to or leave post-It messages for the victim in front of exit 10 Gangnam Station. The visits, which had begun the day before, left the area around the exit almost impassable with chrysanthemums and condolence wreaths. Students at Korea University and other schools have begun putting up posters and post-it notes bearing the hashtag “#survived.”
Seoul’s Seocho Police Station, which is investigating the incident, said its preliminary profiler interview found “no specific cases of [Kim] having been victimized by women."
“Mr. Kim, appears to have generally felt victimized due to paranoia,” the station added.
But many South Koreans are seeing the attack as an example of a crime motivated by misogyny.
For media activist Jang Su-jeong, 35, the incident resonated personally.
“A lot of times, you can be with a man and nothing happens, and then you’re walking alone late at night and get insulted by men or run into ones who have had a lot to drink and are acting up,” Jang said. “As you accumulate more and more memories like that, you always end up shrinking back.”
One of the messages left in front of the subway exit reads, “I survived only by luck.” Analysts suggested one of the reasons the murder has prompted such a wave of commemoration stems from the fear among many women that they could also be victimized. The fact that the attack took place at a public bathroom in the bustling Gangnam district has reminded many women of the ever-present threats they face.
“I find myself growing more and more terrified of others,” said radio writer Kim So-jeong, 34. “I’ve gotten more fearful of public spaces in particular. I think, ‘Don’t use the bathroom, don’t use elevators, don’t walk on side streets.’”
Hong Seong-su, a law professor at Sookmyung Women’s University who has researched hate speech and hate crimes, posted a Facebook message on May 19 saying, “The fact that [Kim] chose ‘some woman’ [as opposed to ‘some person’] as the target for his crime suggests it is not going too far to view this as a crime of hate against women.”
According to Hong, the attack was different from more indiscriminate crimes because “he chose a particular group in general [women], and now all members of that group must suffer the fear.”
Some observers have complained that the response has resulted in all men being treated as potential criminals and fanned hostility between women and men.
But behind the wave of commemoration is a mixture of both the awareness that hate toward women and the disadvantaged in South Korea has reached a critical point - and the fear that this hate could go beyond simple emotion and manifest in actual violence.
Indeed, a number of cases in recent years have involved vulnerable women being targeted for violent crimes. In 2012, a man named Oh Won-choon killed a woman during an attempted abduction and sexual assault as she was walking home. In 2014, a drunk man in his twenties fatally stabbed a woman multiple times with a knife while she was waiting for a bus in Ulsan.
The rate of women victimized in the four chief types of violent crime - which include murder, robbery, arson, and rape - rose 16 percentage points from 72.5% in 1995 to 88.7% in 2014. A Statistics Korea survey showed 67.9% of women responding that they felt “fearful” of crime in 2010. By 2014, the percentage was up to 79.6%.
Another factor behind the memorial wave is the widespread misogyny propagated by websites such as Ilbe Storehouse.
“In a society where general gender discrimination is tolerated, there are cases where women suffer violence because they are women,” said Lee Na-young, a professor of sociology at Chung-Ang University.
“This incident is being regarded not as a specific episode of a mentally disturbed man attacking a specific woman, but as a symbolic example of what happens in a misogynistic society,” Lee said. “That’s why it’s touched off such a passionate response.”
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Gangnam murderer let 6 men go before killing his female victim
Gangnam ‘Random’ Murderer Let 6 Men Go Before Killing His Female Victim
It was found that Mr. Kim, the man charged with the recent Gangnam murder, let six men enter and leave the bathroom he was waiting in before committing the murder on the first woman who entered the bathroom.
The Seocho Police Station released a statement today which read, “The victim of the murder was the first woman who entered the bathroom after Mr. Kim,” and “Between the time when Mr. Kim entered the bathroom and 1:07am, the time the victim entered the bathroom, six men and no women entered the bathroom.”
The CCTV footage released by the police shows Mr. Kim waiting outside the bathroom while facing the first floor from 11:42pm on the 16th for 50 minutes. It is confirmed that while he stood there, 6 women and 10 men used the bathroom.
According to the police, Mr. Kim entered the bathroom and was waiting in the men’s stall when the victim entered the women’s stall. After one man entered and soon left the bathroom, Mr. Kim exited the stall and waited in front of the sinks for the victim to exit her stall.
While being questioned, the perpetrator stated that he committed the crime because, “Women always look down on me,” prompting controversy that this was a misogyny-based crime.
In order to pinpoint an exact motive, the police have called in the profilers who worked on the ‘Oh Won Choon’ case.
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Gangnam murder spurs outpouring of women telling experiences with violence and misogyny
After previously keeping quiet, murder is leading more women to voice fears that they could also be victimized
A recent seemingly random stabbing murder of a woman in Seoul’s busy Gangnam neighborhood has triggered an outpouring of previously undisclosed memories of fear and anxiety among South Korean women. For company employee Gu Min-gyeong, 31, the situation is “familiar yet also strange.”
“These are terrifying yet familiar experiences - the kind of things women might end up discussing after just a few hours together,” she said.
In South Korea, “ordinary” women have begun speaking out about violence against women and their own experiences with misogyny. In the past, gender issues had previously been raised chiefly by groups in the women’s movement. Now it is women in general who are raising questions about existing as a female in everyday life.
For a third straight evening of May 20, a candlelit memorial to victim at exit 10 of Gangnam Subway Station bore witness to accounts from visiting women. Around the same time, an open air speaker’s corner calling for an end to violence against women continued late into the night in Seoul’s Sinchon neighborhood. Most of the speakers were women in their twenties and thirties.
“A man was in the stall next to mine in the women’s bathroom of the subway, and he stretched out on the floor to look in,” recounted one. “I ran like hell, and for a while after that I couldn’t use a subway bathroom.”
“It was around one in the morning, and I was on my way home after working late when I got frightened by a man I didn’t know who was drunk and kept yelling strange things at me,” recalled another.
The fact that the murder took place in a public bathroom in the heavily trafficked Gangnam neighborhood is reminding many women of their past vulnerability in settings such as elevators, side streets, playgrounds, bathrooms, parks, and taxis.
Many “confessions” have been offered on social networking services and at platforms like the “misogyny experience sharing” organized at Exit 10. Since the incident, thousands have followed or liked a Twitter account titled “Public Debate on the Gangnam Station Murder” and a Facebook page titled “Exit 10, Gangnam Station.” As of May 21, thousands of tweets had been posted with the hashtag “#survived.”
Experts have expressed surprise at the phenomenon. In the past, issues involving women in South Korean society have typically followed a pattern in which a particular incident has prompted debate among women’s groups, which has led to the suggestion of institutional alternatives or a discourse on “protecting” women.
“Before, the approach was one where it was mainly women’s groups that raised issues. Now it’s ordinary citizens making their own voices heard,” said Lee Mi-kyung, chair of the Korea Sexual Violence Relief Center.
“This incident shouldn’t be a case where we end up with things like ‘bathroom laws.’ The focus should be on allowing women to live a life where they’re safe and not cowed on a daily basis,” Lee said.
Chung-Ang University sociology professor Lee Na-young said, “We can view this kind of natural trend as a kind of ‘third wave’ in the South Korean women’s movement after the ‘young feminist’ movement of the 1990s.”
Some have also noted that women have been emboldened to speak out after previously keeping quiet about their experiences for fearing of being criticized as “oversensitive” or “suggesting all men are potential attackers.” The argument is that a recent current of misogyny in South Korean society has united many of them in the sense that they too could be victimized - perhaps fatally.
“I had made my own decision to forget about the sexual harassment on the subway or the fear I felt on the street at night,” said a 35-year-old university student surnamed Jung.
“After seeing about this incident, I really sense just how scary it is,” she added.
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Gangnam murder was not a hate crime: police
South Korean police concluded Sunday that the recent murder of a 23-year-old woman in southern Seoul was a random crime by a man suffering from mental illness.
The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said in a press briefing that the killing by the 34-year-old man, only identified by his surname Kim, was a typical crime committed by the mentally disturbed.
Kim was arrested last week on suspicion of stabbing the woman to death at a public bathroom near Gangnam Subway Station on May 17. He allegedly waited until other six men left the toilet and killed the first woman who entered, according to CCTV footage.
The suspect, who had no prior contact with the victim, told police that he had committed the crime because he had been “belittled” by women many times in the past.
Police pointed out that killing the first woman Kim saw in the toilet meant that his crime was neither planned in advance nor systematic.
“There is a need to distinguish between hate crimes and crimes driven by mental illness. The latest case falls in the latter category,” the police said in a press briefing. “Hate crime arises from prejudice on a certain group, while mental illness-driven crimes are usually committed due to symptoms such as delusional thoughts and auditory hallucination.”
After police profilers had hours-long interviews with Kim on two occasions, they concluded that the crime was “accidental” as the suspect had no direct cause to murder the victim and his symptom of schizophrenia had deteriorated at the time of the crime.
According to the police, Kim, who was an only child, has lived alone without interacting with his family. He used to work with women at a restaurant as a waiter, but had to move to the kitchen for his personal hygiene problems, which Kim claimed was due to his female colleagues badmouthing him.
He allegedly told the police that he could not stand mistreatment by women anymore and had to kill them before he got killed.
Since 2008, he has shown abnormal behavior such as not having a shower for over a year, sleeping on the streets or smashing the front door of his house without being aware of his mental illness, police said.
Kim was hospitalized for schizophrenia six times since 2008. But he never took medication since he was discharged from the hospital in January, which police claimed might have prompted him to commit the crime.
In Korea, there are an estimated 500,000 patients suffering from schizophrenia, but only 104,000 visited hospitals for treatment.
According to prosecutors’ data, 36 percent of impulsive crimes between 2012 and 2015 were committed by those with mental illness, followed by alcohol and drug addiction at 36 percent and dissatisfaction with reality at 24 percent.
As part of efforts to prevent crimes by the mentally ill, the police has been granted more authority to order the mentally disturbed to be admitted to hospitals when they detect any abnormal behavior. The revision to the mental health act passed at the National Assembly last week despite lingering concerns over possible human rights violations by authorities on the mentally ill.
The police conclusion on the nature of the crime, however, sparked further public outcry and concerns among experts and Koreans who continued to mourn the death of the young woman at a makeshift shrine outside exit 10 of Gangnam Station on Sunday afternoon.
“It is impossible to define the cause of crime as either mental problem or hatred against women. Many experts should come together to study his mental problem more in-depth,” a lawyer Go Ji-woon from Gamdong law firm told The Korea Herald.
“Despite his mental illness, he might have unconsciously developed hatred against women. Without considering the social atmosphere, defining his crime as stemming from solely mental problem can cast doubts on the probe.”
“I cannot trust the police anymore. I don’t think police can solve violence against women any longer. It seems that the police are trying to cover up the case to make it not look like a hate crime,” Kim Eun-ji, 25, said. “Not to mention, the police labelling the case as ‘crime by the mentally ill’ might create prejudice for those suffering from mental problems.”
Tensions were running high around the subway station as male protestors wearing a mask and holding up placards reading “Not all men are potential murderers” and “The crime was not misogynist” clashed with mourners and activists at the scene.
Park Byung-hak, 36, who was browsing post-it memos on the wall, slammed the police for seemingly denying the misogynist nature of the crime.
“I guess that police analysis on the criminal motive is an obvious error,” said Park, who came to the scene for the first time since the incident took place. “I think that Korean society is just too used to gender-based discrimination and violence against women.”
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OP Note: There aren't a lot of English articles on this although it's been a huge controversy in Korea for almost a week. I visited the Gangnam memorial site on Saturday to add my own post-it and to mourn for the young woman's death. For context, Korea ranked 117th on the WEF's gender equality index (lagging behind countries like the UAE and Qatar) and our gender pay gap is 35%, the worst of all industrialized countries. The society is still deeply rooted in a patriarchal Confucian way of thought and I have so many horror stories about sexual harrassment, stalking, and everday misogyny. Though things are slowly getting better, this incident has shed light on how far Korea still has to go as a society.