More Uijeongbu News ...
View from my daily commute to work
A lot has been happening in Uijeongbu recently - at least, relatively speaking - but after coming back from Ulsan with a nasty sunburn I was in no mood to write about it as it happened. Especially since it's not exactly uplifting news. Brian in Jeollanam-do covered both of the stories on his blog, but I'm going to mention them here as well.
First came the news that, at the start of last week, police apprehended a man accused of raping 125 women over a seven year period in the greater Uijeongbu and Yangju area. As I mentioned in one of the comments, the man responsible gained access to the women's apartments by climbing up gas pipes located outside the apartment buildings and then entered through open or unlocked veranda doors. Living on the third of fourth floor of an apartment building can offer a false sense of security in this regard, and I'm not sure how many CCTV security cameras are aimed to cover this part of the building. On top of this, after reading a few Korean articles on the subject, my academy vice-director and a co-teacher mentioned how there were also a few cases where he returned to the same apartment at a later date for another attempt at sexual assault -- either involving the same person, or against a sister or cousin sharing the apartment.
Commenter fattycat asked why the raped women didn't "lock the doors, put bars on the windows, install an alarm system or anything?" to prevent a repeat offense, and it does seem to be a valid question. My guess is that the victims didn't want to draw any extra attention to what happened for fear that it would detract from their standing within the neighborhood. If you put bars on your windows you will probably be asked to explain the decision to both the building manager and all your neighbors; once word gets around through word of mouth the whole community may know, and that's something that will follow you around for quite some time. (Plus, bars are a very obvious cue from the outside for those who don't already know where you live.)
In the United States it's easy to say that it's not the victims fault (and it's not!), but things aren't always so straightforward in other cultures. In both Italy and France there are documented cases of the court ruling that it was 'impossible' to rape a woman wearing tight jeans, because in order to get the jeans off she would have to help -- making it consensual. This is as recently as 1999/2000 that we're talking about, too. In addition to that is the mention in this article from The Guardian of gang rapes of teenage girls in French suburbs. The whole thing is worth a read, but the relevant section I'm thinking about is here:
The girl will be fragile, or unprotected, or a runaway. Or she's just broken the rules of the banlieue. (One teacher reported his pupils as saying, "Nightclubs are full of slags because if they're in a club, they must be a slag.") She gives in, and the boy says, "Be nice or I'll tell your parents/friends/the neighbourhood." Then he says, "Be nice to my friends, too." "The trick is to isolate the victim," Genestal says. "Once she's seen as easy, no one will help her, not even the girls."
If just going to a club is enough to make someone a target (in France), can you fault a woman in Korea for not wanting to do anything to publicize being sexually assaulted? I honestly don't know the answer to this, but I wonder how many people would offer support and how many would assume that she did something to provoke or 'deserve' it. (This holds true concerning parts of the United States as well.)
I have a personal story related to a similar theme that I shared on Facebook but not on LiveJournal. A couple of months ago - in June or July - I woke up on a Sunday morning to the rather unexpected sight of my apartment door closing. I live in a studio apartment (or "one room" as they're known in Korea) and thus it's possible to see my whole apartment from the entrance; conversely, it's very easy to see the front door from almost everywhere inside. When I went outside to check on what was happening - assuming maybe a visitor or drunken neighbor had got the wrong apartment - I heard the sounds of someone running hurriedly down the stairs. Later in the day I found my umbrella in the stairwell between the sixth floor and the fifth floor of our building.
Between living on the sixth and topmost floor of the building and having a security keypad on the ground floor entrance I feel pretty safe here. Sometimes I locked my door and other times I didn't. This was also true in the United States and usually depended on what time I came home and how tired I was at the time. Had my mysterious guest been outside when I opened my apartment door I could very well have imagined someone who mistakenly tried the wrong door, a delivery worker with the wrong address, or even the apartment manager coming in to do maintenance work. But why would they run away? And with my umbrella at that. It's easy to gain a false sense of security when you grow accustomed to a place; even more so when you don't read the local news stories about any bad things that do take place. There's also something to be said for the mistaken belief that bad things always happen to someone else. The general consensus among virtually everyone I've shared this story with is that it was an attempted robbery, but if it works for robbers it can just as easily work for rapists.
The second Uijeongbu-related news that Brian brought up is about a middle school girl who beat up her gym teacher to the point where the teacher went to the hospital for treatment. I'm rather curious which school it was, although I think we can rule out Uijeongbu Girl's Middle School due to the fact that Breda in Korea hasn't said anything about the incident. While I have very little experience with Korean middle school students, the few that I have dealt with in a teaching capacity have been so lethargic that I often wonder if they're still alive. Guess now I know there are a few triggers to avoid.