By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter

Elementary school students' sexual abuse of their peers for more than two years in a southeastern city has gripped the nation. Administrators and teachers are blamed for not preventing such crimes while public concern over children's easy access to pornography is growing.

On Wednesday, a committee of parents, teachers and women's rights groups announced that several gang rape cases had taken place in an elementary school in Daegu involving more than 100 underage assaulters and victims since 2006.

The sexual abuse first started with male seniors at the school performing sodomy on their male juniors by threatening them. It later developed into gang rape on female students involving several middle and high school students. The case was revealed last November when a teacher found her students having mock sex in her classroom.

The sexual abuse took place in broad daylight in the back gardens of schools, playgrounds or empty houses. The students later said they did not exactly know what they were doing, but they had to perform it out of fear that seniors might beat them.

The investigative group said the assaulters tried to re-enact scenes from pornography they had seen on the Internet and cable TV. ``The younger assaulters considered their crimes as gimmicks that should not have been caught. They were forced to watch porn and have sex with boys or girls,'' said Kim Tae-young of Daegu Metropolitan Police Agency.

Nowadays, Internet and television show more uncensored and explicit contents than the sex education they receive in classrooms. ``We should come up with ways to prevent children from accessing such filthy material,'' a Korea Federation Teachers' Association spokesman said.

Meanwhile, the school and regional education office and the police came under fire for trying to downplay the case when it was first reported by the teacher.

The headmaster of the school made some of the assaulters read sex education books and consulted their parents. He reportedly also blamed their teachers ``for not keeping a proper eye on the students.''

``As the offenders were also victims of this society and since they were all under age, we thought lecturing them would be much better,'' the headmaster said.

It was not until January that he finally talked to the regional education office. The office was also hesitant to check the facts and devise measures. It also failed to report the case, instead tried to conduct therapy on the assaulters.

The investigation group claimed that during the long bureaucracy period, at least three more students were victimized

``Now that pornography has become a textbook for children, various forms of sexual assault have become a reality. All the people in this society should share the responsibility for the case and set out some fundamental measures to address it'' a spokesman of the committee said.

bjs@koreatimes.co.kr