By Lee Kyung-min
Police booked 868 people without detention for allegedly committing acts of violence while dating and detained 61 of them in February, according to the National Police Agency (NPA), Sunday.
The NPA said that it received a total of 1,279 reports of physical or sexual assault or threats between intimate partners during a nationwide intensive one-month campaign against such crimes.
The probe followed an increase in dating violence amid a widespread public perception that violence between partners is a domestic and personal affair and thus the authorities should stay out of it.
“We launched the campaign to encourage victims to report to police, because many are reluctant to do so because of such perception and for fear of shame and acts of revenge,” an NPA official said.
More than half of the assailants, or 58.3 percent, were aged between 20 and 39, followed by those between 40 and 59 at 35.6 percent.
Most victims, 92 percent, were women, but 4.1 percent of them were men, with the remaining cases being mutual assault.
Assault accounted for 61.9 percent of the crimes, followed by confining and making threats at 17.4 percent and sexual assault at 5.4 percent. There was also one murder and one attempted murder.
In one case in Daegu in February, a man got drunk and drove into the restaurant owned by his girlfriend after she broke up with him. After smashing the restaurant entrance with his car, he tried to hit her with a hammer but was caught by police.
In Ulsan, a man hit his girlfriend for “talking back” to him during an argument in January. The man sent more than 100 text messages threatening to make their sexual relationship public. Police have been investigating the case which was reported in February.
Considering that almost 60 percent had previous convictions, police are seeking to ask the National Assembly to set up a domestic violence disclosure law, in line with “Clare’s Law” in the United Kingdom.
Named after Clare Wood, who was killed by her partner in 2009, the law allows women to make a police request for the disclosure of criminal records of their partners.