At the Noraebang: 5 v 1
Monday evening, while teaching my final class of the day, I asked my students what they did over their weekend. One girl mentioned going to the movies. The sole boy in class spoke about wanting to play baseball but staying inside because it was raining too much to meet his friends outdoors. The other girl said she had a horrible time and went on to elucidate.
This girl - currently in sixth grade - went to the downtown of Uijeongbu to pass the afternoon and ended up in a noraebang (노래방) with five boys in their first year of middle school. As she went back over her story again to add more details she mentioned that the boys had given her money to go with them to the noraebang and then gave her more money once they were all inside. She tried calling her friends to come and join her but only one other girl came -- and then the boys called one of their friends to make it a group of six boys and two girls. She didn't have much fun with the sex ratio being what it was, but at least that was the reason for her disappointment concerning her weekend and not anything more.
Hearing that she accompanied a group of guys to a noraebang who paid her for her time was rather surprising but I wasn't really sure what type of comment to make about the situation. The Grand Narrative writes that the age of consent in Korea is 13 years old which makes her weekend activities that much riskier. Since we were in a classroom setting I'm not sure how much detail she felt comfortable sharing with me about the meeting so I can only assume that things didn't get out of hand and her distaste was over spending time with that many boys rather than with anything in particular that they did.
I did make sure to tell her to be careful in the future and mentioned the incident to her former teacher so that someone else in the academy was aware of what had happened. My current co-teacher for her class seems extremely disinterested in teaching. On top of that she is also quite rude, so I don't exactly trust her to handle the situation very gracefully. I really hope that my student takes care of herself in order to avoid any potentially dangerous situations in the future.