Yes, this is a big deal: Domestic Violence Laws that Cannot Protect the Victims
Performance with shoes in memory of women killed by their male partners ⓒKorea Women’s Hot Line https://hotline.or.kr    
※Family is a symbol of love and comfort, but 53.8% of Korean families are abusive. Even so, domestic violence is widely considered ‘someone else’s business’ or ‘family matters that should not be meddled with.’ We at Ilda would like to explore the fundamental solutions to domestic violence. The ‘Yes, this is a big deal’ series will run as part of the ‘May, Month of Peace Free of Domestic Violence’ campaign by Korea Women’s Hot Line. The writer of this article, Jang Yumi, is an activist working for the Human Rights Policy Department of Korea Women’s Hot Line.
 
Women are battered, threatened and murdered for being wives.
 
With the recent Gangnam murder case, the voices calling for raised awareness and acknowledgement of women’s fear of hate crimes against them are louder than ever. Misogynistic hate crimes are a form of violence against women in a society full of sexism. Women become victims of violence and murder for being a woman, and not just at the hands total strangers. Even in the home, supposedly a place of utmost safety and peace, many women’s lives are being threatened by their spouses.
 
Korea Women’s Hot Line analyzed cases of women who were murdered by their intimate partners in 2015 and found at least 93 women were killed or almost killed by their husbands in South Korea this past year. These women lost their lives or suffered serious bodily injury after being beaten and stabbed multiple times or burned by their husbands.
 
If you look at the male offenders’ motive for violence or murder in their own words, their reason for the crime was that women wanted to break up with them, or that it was “a spur of the moment thing” during a fight. The specific reasons for the “spur of the moment” crimes are as follows: because their wife “continued to go to the old senior center and church after moving to a different neighborhood,” “was only looking at her cell phone when drinking with me,” “peeled beans that were not fully ripe,” “came home late,” “refused to relocate with me,” “didn’t answer my question”…
 
During the past year, women endured this kind of violence or, in the end, lost their lives to it, because they were wives.
 
“Reasons” for violence against wives
 
The role of a wife in a family, along with that of a mother, has been determining women’s identity in our long history of thinking women “belong” in the home. Women, as not just wives but also mothers, stay busy all day making sure each and every family member eats well and rests comfortably as well as raising and taking care of children. Yet, women’s labor is considered “worthless work” they do with ease in the comfort of their own home. And if they are somehow seen as not fulfilling their role, they are immediately criticized: “How could a woman not do her job when all she has to do is stay home all day?”
 
Of course, women do not always stay home all day. Some women work outside the home to make a living, but home is always considered where women “belong.” Questions such as “How do you take care of your children when you are working?” or “You make that much money [such that it makes up for the loss of time spent with your children]?” are reserved for women only. Women are not even allowed to stay away from home for long.
 
These stereotypes about how women must act send out a strong message. Women find themselves engulfed in anxiety and guilt when they feel they haven’t performed their duties as wives and mothers adequately or when they believe something terrible happened because of such failures. If their husband becomes violent with them “because of” their failure, they blame themselves for having been at fault, as a coping mechanism.
 
But violent crimes are being committed by husbands for arbitrary reasons, as in “because she peeled beans that were not fully ripe,” or for no particular reason at all. Regardless of what the reasons are, women are being victimized for being wives. For women, home can no longer be a safe haven.
 
Laws only protect the “family,” not the “victim.”
 
In Korean families where women exist only “to serve others,” violence against wives is quite common. Domestic violence laws were not yet in place in 1983, when in a study on wife battering conducted by Korea Women’s Hot Line, 42.2% of women said they had been victims of violence committed by their husbands. None of this was regulated by laws of any sort then.
 
It was only as recently as 20 years ago that wife battering became a crime punishable by law in Korea when domestic violence laws were finally enacted in 1997. But the overall consensus in Korean society still does not push the justice system to work actively in stopping wife battering, protecting women’s right to life and human rights and punishing violent offenders.
 
While violence committed against one’s “private” acquaintance(s) outside the home is punished by law, violence committed by a man in the privacy of his home is often considered to the righteous actions of a patriarch who just wants to “lead his family in the right direction.” It is assumed that a patriarch resorts to violence only because his wife or children “did something to deserve a good beating”, and even when it’s not, his acts of violence are still considered “his business” or “his family affairs.”
 
Such is the view of the police, the very people who are supposed to properly respond to wife battering cases and protect the female victims’ right to life. In May 2013, the South Korean National Police Agency conducted a survey among its 8,932 police officers and 933 public investigators who are in charge of stopping domestic violence throughout the country on their views on domestic violence. Fifty-eight percent of the respondents said they believe “it is best to handle domestic violence incidents within the home,” and 35% responded “there is not much the police can do [to help victims of domestic violence].”
 
These results are not all that surprising, considering the nature of the domestic violence laws in their current state in Korea. On a fundamental level, the laws do not protect the rights of the female victims. The Special Act on Punishment of Domestic Violence states, “By supervising offenders of domestic violence to promote environmental changes and behavioral corrections, [the act] seeks to help families restore the peace and comfort destroyed by domestic violence crimes, build a healthy family and protect the rights of victims and family members.”
 
What the law prioritizes is pretty clear: domestic violence is a crime that “destroys the family” and it is “family” that must be restored and protected. Protection of victims’ rights only comes secondary.
 
No punishment for criminals who abuse their wives
 
Under a legal system that seeks to restore and protect the family, punishment for domestic violence offenders has undoubtedly been on the periphery and in reality, is not even being given out.
 
According to the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family’s 2013 study on victims of domestic violence, 58.3% of the victims said no legal action was taken against the offenders after they reported the incident to the police. Data from the Ministry of Justice shows that a mere 8.7% of domestic violence cases reported to the police were brought to court by prosecutors in July 2015.
 
What’s more, the overall non-conviction (dismissal without a conviction) rate of domestic violence cases has consistently been over 60% (64.1% in 2011; 62.6% in 2012; 60.4% in 2013) according to the 2014 data from the Korean Institute of Criminology. Or the cases are treated as “home protection cases” and sent to the family court, which hardly leads to “punishment” since the family court’s aim is to correct the violent behaviors of offenders through therapy.
 
In particular, among the actions that can be taken in “correctional supervision” such as “restraining orders, limited custody rights, community service, attending lectures, supervised probation, institutionalization, treatment therapy, or counseling therapy,” those that can actually protect the safety of the female victims – restraining orders and limited custody rights – were given out only 0.6% of the time in 2014. Thirty percent of the cases were dismissed with no court order, offenders were ordered to go through counseling therapy in 19.2% of the cases and in 9.3%, to fulfill community service requirements (List of Actions by the National Court Administration, 2015).
 
In Korean court proceedings where protecting and maintaining family unity is upheld as the ultimate goal, wife battering cases quickly turn into “home protection cases,” which the court then dismisses altogether after simply ordering the offenders to get counseling. The Korean government’s ways of emphasizing the value of keeping the family together in dealing with violence against women reached its peak with its “system of suspended sentence on the condition of counseling” launched in 2007, where offenders can make a deal in which they avoid prosecution on the condition that they will seek counseling. These cases do not have to go to court at all.
 
Offenders who were given suspended sentences on the condition of counseling dramatically increased to 3.2% out of all domestic abuse offenders and 29.6% out of all suspended sentencing in September, 2014, from 1.4% out of all domestic abuse offenders and 6.2% out of all suspended sentencing in 2007 (Study on the Current Status of the Special Act on Domestic Violence and Ways for Legal Improvements by the Korean Institute of Criminology, 2014). Now the offenders no longer need to bother being sentenced to counseling through court trials; they can avoid the whole ordeal and choose to get counseling first.
 
What’s more, the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office’s “Guide on Suspended Sentencing for Domestic Violence Offenders on the Condition of Counseling” in 2013 provides very vague definitions of suitable cases. For example, “matters that are light in nature; cases that, by taking into consideration the opinion of those involved, are deemed appropriate [for such sentencing] in light of harmony and healing among family members; cases where the perpetrator of domestic violence is in need of professional counseling considering the perpetrator’s motive for the crime, prior criminal record, and tendencies” are said to be the cases that justifiably merit suspended sentencing. Definitely not crystal clear.
 
More than anything, in a society where most wife battering cases are dismissed without a conviction or its offenders are sentenced to counseling, the system of suspended sentencing on the condition of counseling in fact contributes to strengthening the perception that wife battering is not a crime to be punished but a mistake to be remedied with counseling. In other words, wife battering is seen by the Korean criminal justice system as a crime punishable by counseling.
 
Women are still “in that place”
 
We have been hearing endless, long-standing narratives of women who have been abused by their husbands. For women, to experience violence is to realize that they  “have not achieved equality” despite what they may have been taught. It is an experience that ultimately undermines one’s dignity and self-worth. Regardless of whether society sees it as minor or serious, violence is an extreme form of discrimination against those who are viewed as inferior and therefore, not deserving of equal rights.
 
Violence against wives is a facet of a society that thinks nothing of the prevalence of discrimination against women and it demonstrates our extremely unequal gender dynamics.
 
Some women are “fortunate” enough to be forced to leave “that place” called home. Some women lose their lives at the hands of their violent husband as they reach a dead end in “that place.” Some women stay in “that place,” after numerous attempts to walk away or escape fail, trapped by the society that claims “family must stay together.”
 
None of us can put responsibility on the shoulders of women who are trapped in a system that seems unable to protect them from violence by their husbands. In order for us to no longer put it on the female victims to stay alive in “that place” on their own, and for the “No More Domestic Violence” slogan to not remain a vain cry, the current criminal system that refuses to punish offenders for the sake of keeping the family together must be completely revised. We don’t have that much time left. That is, if you think women’s lives matter.
[Published: May 25, 2016. Translated by Femi K]
 
*Original article: http://ildaro.com/7478
 
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