By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter
Police will publish a guidebook for foreign nationals on how to react when they are assaulted amid growing crimes involving expatriates.
Gyeonggi Provincial Police Agency said Thursday it is working to issue the guidebook in seven foreign languages ㅡ English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Mongolian, Indonesian and Russian ㅡ in cooperation with Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS).
This is the first time that a regional police agency has teamed up with an education institute to run programs designed to help expatriates settle here.
Its first edition, which will be published soon, will focus on domestic and school violence against immigrant wives and their children.
``Immigrant wives are especially vulnerable to domestic violence due to lack of proficiency in Korean. This is a crime. But they don't know how to cope with it,'' Kim Choong-sil, a Gyeonggi police officer, told The Korea Times. ``It's also true foreign crime is on the rise. But foreign criminals also have no idea how they would be dealt with by the Korean government. That's the reason for the publication.''
He said the second edition of the book would include how to handle legal hurdles when they fall victim to any criminal incident including car accident.
According to the agency, more than 346,000 foreigners including 30,000 immigrant wives are living in its precinct, accounting for 30 percent of all foreign residents in Korea.
The handbook will be distributed at police offices across the province and through certain civic groups.