South Korea’s deadly indifference to violence against women

A nursing home worker asked the police for help three times, saying her former colleague was stalking her. But prosecutors refused to issue a restraining order, deeming his stalking “not repetitive enough.” A week later, her former colleague stabbed her to death at her workplace.

A hospital worker called the police twice, saying her ex-boyfriend was beating and stalking her after she broke up with him — calling 168 times and sending 400 text messages in a week. Prosecutors declined to detain him, questioning whether he was dangerous enough. Five days later, he stabbed the woman at her workplace, critically wounding her.

A woman in her 30s contacted the police four times, saying her ex-boyfriend was beating and stalking her, even forcing her to move. She told her family that she was scared that he would kill her, which he eventually did — by stabbing her on the street.

Two days later, a woman in her 50s was fatally stabbed by her boyfriend — who had already been convicted once and reported again for beating her.

Gruesome attacks like these — all of which occurred over a six-day period, from July 26 to 31, across South Korea — have made headlines with numbing regularity for years. But the latest wave of violence once again highlights how widespread femicide is — and how indifferent the authorities remain to the problem.

Korea is considered a relatively safe country, where gun violence is rare and violent crimes in public spaces are uncommon. But many killings occur behind closed doors, often as acts of intimate partner violence against women.

The government does not release official data on how many women are killed as a result of such violence — another reminder of its indifference. But the annual tally by the Korea Women’s Hotline shows that at least 181 women were killed by their partners, former partners or stalkers in 2024 alone — almost one death every other day — for reasons including trying to break up or refusing to have sex.

Even that figure, based only on media reports, is believed to be below the true number — and it is rising, up from 97 in 2020.

At the same time, reports of dating violence soared to over 77,000 in 2023 compared to about 50,000 in 2019. While some of that increase may reflect greater awareness encouraging more women to report abuse, the numbers are alarming all the same.

And such crimes are getting bolder, no longer confined to private spaces. Many recent cases occurred in public, in places like the victims’ workplaces or in busy neighborhoods.

In May, a man kidnapped his ex-partner and killed her on a residential street. In a high-profile case last year, an elite medical student fatally stabbed his girlfriend at a building in Gangnam.

This must stop.

Doing so requires not only reforming law enforcement and the legal system but also confronting the unequal power dynamics and pervasive gender inequality in our society. Femicide is rooted in a culture that views women not as equal human beings but as men’s possessions, to be controlled and punished with violence if they disobey.

Policymakers must revise the domestic violence law to protect not only those married to or living with their abusers but also those abused by dating partners. They should make it easier for police to arrest or separate abusers from victims and to monitor offenders under restraining orders.

The police, prosecutors and judges should be educated to adopt a gender perspective in law enforcement. Far too many cases show that officials failed to use already-existing measures to protect victims or simply dismissed their repeated pleas for help.

We must also prevent these crimes from happening in the first place.

Schools and communities should strengthen gender equality education to promote healthy relationship dynamics and challenge harmful gender stereotypes, such as men being dominant and women being submissive. Popular online forums promoting toxic, misogynistic narratives should be scrutinized.

That may be a hard sell in Korea’s current political and social climate, where gender equality is often treated as a taboo and femicides are dismissed as the actions of a few “crazy guys,” rather than a structural issue. But there’s only so much the overstretched police can do to curb the relentless wave of violence.

Police recently pledged sweeping efforts to protect victims. Yet in a mere three-day span as I wrote this article, a man killed both his girlfriend and a female acquaintance on the same day, another stabbed his girlfriend in an attempted murder and a third man, under a restraining order for stalking, broke into a hospital and threatened workers with a knife while searching for his ex-partner.

Better law enforcement to punish abusers and protect victims is critical. But focusing only on that without addressing the root causes is like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike -- helpful, but not enough to stem the tide.

Jung Ha-won is a journalist and the author of "Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide."