I don’t understand how a man who beat his wife to death and broke 18 ribs in her body managed to get away with a 12 year sentence. How is this possible? I mean, you’d probably have to beat someone hard for a very long time to break fucking 18 ribs in the body. Another woman dies of domestic violence. Brokerage of international marriages that prey on the poverty of certain parts of Southeast Asia is nothing but human trafficking in disguise. It’s about time that women’s organizations in Korea press the government to fucking scrutinize these human trafficking agencies and raise the bar for the establishment of these agencies. If there is no way to stop them from operating, then make it so that they provide adequate information to the women they’re selling into bondage (oops, is it marriage?), have them provide classes on cultural adjustment and language, and allow the women to be able to get a divorce if they find themselves unhappy in these marriages. These marriage brokering agencies probably make use of the recent popularity of Korean pop culture in Southeast Asia to lure young women into marrying men much older than them. Believe me, the men they marry are nothing like the actors in K-dramas, and the life they lead are not even remotely close to the fantastic lives depicted in K-dramas.
This is an ongoing problem that has been around for quite a while now. I remember hearing from a friend who is a district attorney at a regional court of her cases of abused Vietnamese women. These women often suffer from extreme degrees of abuse because they are usually isolated in rural areas where there is virtually no support system in place and because they have no means of reaching out for help in a country and in a language foreign to them. I can’t believe that the district court would worry about this murder ruining Korea’s image in Vietnam. What they should be worrying about instead if how to protect the rights of these women whose access to the legal and social system is very limited. Korea really needs to attend to the plights of foreign laborers and brides who have ended up in Korea not because Korea is a great country to live in but because Korea has now become a country comparably wealthier to these people’s countries of origin. And because of its economic ascent, Korea has now become an aggressor in labor exploitation and abuse on a world scale. Instead of taking a defensive stance–what about the poor in Korea? how can Korea be an aggressor when Korea’s so dependent on the U.S.?–which fails to identify this issue as a structural and systemic issue of late capitalism and focuses on where to turn the blame, it’s about time more Koreans think seriously about the society’s responsibility toward the disenfranchised foreigners in Korea. Sometimes when I encounter discriminatory remarks toward foreign laborers in Korea, I’m so struck by the lapse of historical memory. Only recently Korea was a country that exported labor and women for marriage overseas. Whoever can be prejudiced toward foreign laborers in Korea only needs to remember that he was the person he is looking down on now thirty years ago. Damn, I hate to be so moralistic, but I’m so angry I can’t help myself.
