By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter

Teachers' caning of students during class has been grudgingly accepted in Korea as the so-called ``whip of love,'' but a recent court ruling giving a suspended prison sentence to an elementary school teacher is triggering a fresh round of controversy over whether it should be tolerated.

Some Internet users and civic activists are calling for the implementation of a law banning corporal punishment completely.

Late last month, the Incheon District Court sentenced a female elementary school teacher who hit two of her second grade students more than 80 times in October last year for not having done their homework to eight months in prison suspended for two years. It was one of the harshest rulings handed down on a teacher involving corporal punishment. The teacher is appealing the sentence.

According to court documents, the teacher hit a boy, identified as Kang, and a girl named Na for not having done their homework. When they had done it, she called them liars and caned them, which required them to undergo two to three weeks of medical treatment.

The Incheon Metropolitan Office of Education suspended the teachers' license for just three months.

A group of activists and netizens are staging an online campaign, demanding stronger punitive measures and are moving to file petitions to the education office and the court.

The mothers of the children said the students are suffering from extreme trauma. Na's mother said her daughter had done her homework, but was punished because she cried when she saw her friend being beaten.

Activists are urging the government to ban all kinds of corporal punishment. The related education law encourages nonphysical punishment but there are no exact guidelines ― this allows teachers to carry out physical punishment inside classrooms, they claim.

Song Myeong-su, who is leading on and offline campaigns for the case said, ``How can physical punishment be educational when violence is clearly the opposite?''

Song said each school should set up a disciplinary committee to decide on punishment.

However, some people still support corporal punishment. They claim that it is the only way to maintain discipline because so many students no longer listen to their teachers anymore.

Others say caning doesn't work anymore.

``These days, kids are so wild that you cannot even dream of hitting one,'' an elementary school teacher in Seoul, confided. ``The children often threaten us that they will call the police and sometimes make video records and upload it on the Internet. These days, we don't know who is in charge,'' she said.

bjs@koreatimes.co.kr