By Yi Whan-woo
The number of minors committing sex offenses against their peers has increased more than 11-fold over the past 10 years, the Supreme Court said in data released Wednesday.
A total of 690 aged between 10 and 18 were convicted by juvenile courts in 2011 for committing sex crimes. The figure has surged from 60 in 2002, raising concerns about the soaring rate.
The data was released amid debate on the government’s move to toughen punishments for sex criminals following a series of murders, rapes, and sexual assaults against women and minors.
A number of those offenders are minors, and the Ministry of Justice is working to decide whether to treat them equally with adult offenders.
The latest incident involving a minor occurred Tuesday when a 17-year-old boy was arrested for sexually molesting a preschool girl at a women’s public bathroom in Seoul.
The suspect turned out to be a high school dropout on probation for sexually harassing a middle school girl in 2011.
The number of juveniles convicted of sex crimes against their age group was 62 in 2003. The ratio then jumped to 108 in 2004, and has been increasing ever since.
About half of the 690 minors convicted in 2011 were high school dropouts. Among them, 67.4 percent of them lived with a single parent or without any parents.
The data also showed that the number of youth offenders committing sex-related crimes, including prostitution, rape and sexual harassment, jumped to 1,836 in 2011, more than a three-fold rise from 600 in 2002.
Meanwhile, the number of adult offenders standing trial for sex crimes has been hovering around the 2,000 mark for the last 10 years, the data showed.
The number of adult defendants indicted for rape and sexual molestation climbed to 2,337 from 1,981 in the last decade.