Lee Hae-rin is a City Desk reporter at The Korea Times, covering social issues, tourism and taekwondo. She is passionate about speaking up for the rights of minorities, including women, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities and animals as well as discovering the latest makgeolli trend in town. Feel free to reach her at lhr@koreatimes.co.kr.
Bill proposed to ban discrimination against multicultural families
Rep. Kwon In-sook of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea / Korea Times file.
By Lee Hae-rin
By Lee Hae-rin
A bill to ban discrimination against multicultural families and support their settlement here in a financial and administrative manner has been proposed.
Rep. Kwon In-sook of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) and fellow DPK lawmakers introduced the bill, Friday, which will revise the Multicultural Family Support Act.
The current act does not have a provision that prohibits discrimination against multicultural families and there is no basis for evaluating the differentiation of multicultural policies, drawing flak for its failure to enhance multicultural acceptance.
The revised bill includes an anti-discrimination clause, and obligates the government and local municipalities to evaluate and enhance their multicultural policies with respect to discrimination.
Also, the current act lacks a legal basis to provide government aid for establishing and running multicultural family support centers.
The revision allows multicultural family support centers to apply for government funds. There are 228 centers throughout the country in need of financial aid.
“Multicultural families are members of our community. Yet they suffer many difficulties due to lack of legal protection from discrimination and promotion of their integration into the community,” said Kwon.
“By passing this legislation, we can establish legal grounds to help multicultural families' settlement and enhance their social inclusion in the country.”
According to data from Statistics Korea, there were 370,000 multicultural households in the country as of 2020, accounting for 1.8 percent of total households.
Meanwhile, Korea only scored 52.8 out of 100 in terms of multicultural acceptance in 2018, which is 1.14 points lower than that of three years ago, according to the latest study by the Korean Women's Development Institute.