Anti-Sexual Violence Movement against Harsh Punishment? = Activism of Korean WomenLink against Sexual Violence since the Mid-2000s

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In South Korean society, issues of sexual violence have been socially problematized by the feminist movement. The Korean anti-sexual violence movement has been acknowledged both in and outside the country for establishing legislation in a relatively short amount of time. However, there have been intensive media reports of extreme sex-crimes against children since the mid-2000s. Around these cases, a tendency towards ‘punitivism’ has emerged in public opinion and governmental policies, which includes harsher punishment on particular sex-crime and social segregation of sexual assaulters. Some scholars point out that the tendency towards punitivism was caused by the feminist movement against sexual violence. In the case of the United States, the feminist movement has also been held responsible for the formation and support of a penal trend, especially within the anti-sex trafficking movement and against sexual violence—a phenomenon which has been deemed ‘carceral feminism’. In this context, I examine how Korean feminist organizations against sexual violence have built their strategies and activities in opposition to this recent trend towards punitivism in order to show how the feminist movement against sexual violence interacts with legal institutions in the case of the Republic of Korea. Through a content analysis of documents of feminist organizations against sexual violence, combined with data collected from interviews with activists, I argue that Korean feminist organizations have utilized legal institutions as a tool of their movement in multiple strategies; on the one hand, through legal/systemic activism and cultural activism, and on the other hand, also including efforts for juridical settlement while manifesting their awareness of the risk of punitivism.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Abstract
• Introduction
• The Legal/Institutional Activism of K-WomenLink since the mid-2000s
• The Perception and Dilemmas of Activists of K-WomenLink
• Multiple Strategies of K-WomenLink against the Punitivism tendency
• Conclusion
• References