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By Anthony Hegarty
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Between 2007 and 2015 the numbers averaged 40 cases per year, but from 2016 to 2018 the numbers jump to 118, 195, and 294 respectively. Although there is no evidence that any of these young women have come to harm, my role was to conduct the research from a potential harm perspective.
Nationally, most women disappeared on Mondays, although in Seoul it's Thursdays. But in the relatively small city of Gyeongsan, which according to the Korean Statistical Information Service (KOSIS), has a population of just 261,924, and as of June 2019, 15,926 of them were female aged 20 to 29 years.
They could have had six more, but they disappeared between 2016 and 2018. Nothing remarkable about that perhaps, except that five of them disappeared on a Wednesday and the other one on a Tuesday.
A further examination revealed that this year two other women aged between 18 and 30 have disappeared; one on a Thursday, and the other only the month is known. Looking back further I found that another woman's disappearance in 2014 is recorded to have occurred on a Tuesday.
In all cases, the reports were made some days, weeks or months after the disappearance, suggesting that nobody missed them initially, and thus any times reported can only ever be estimates; which also means the Tuesday events could have gone into the early hours of the Wednesdays, and the Thursday event could have started on the Wednesday.
"Linkage blindness" is where there is a failure to examine cases as potentially related, instead, treating them as individual isolated matters. With missing persons, the first thing we look at is the time and day, yet the Korean forms require just the date and it seems nobody thought to check the days, thus nobody saw the fact that Wednesday could be a critical link!
This pattern could have been identified much earlier, but sadly there is a deep-rooted culture of form filling and box ticking across all government departments, and this dependence on forms has resulted in employees failing to go beyond them, and thus failing to be curious.
The emphasis is on the form being completed and all the boxes being ticked, and any failure in this could impact negatively on an individual's performance review. The form being completed is evidence of the job being done. But has protecting the said review become a bigger concern than the public who officials are paid to safeguard?
For their part, the wider public have to accept that there are some crimes that the police in all countries cannot prevent, and the mindset that "bad things only happen to other people" has never applied to anyone, anywhere. Koreans are willing to spend large amounts on protecting their cellphones, pads and motion cameras for their cars, yet nothing on protecting themselves.
I should, however, remind the reader that on the limited information I have, I can produce no evidence that any of the Gyeongsan women have come to harm, or that the days of disappearances are anything more than a coincidence.
But I suspect that the Missing Person Form will be quickly updated with a new box for "day" of disappearance; and whilst some might think that that will solve the problems, it will also add to them, because once again, those employees will be told "what to think," instead of "how to think."
The writer is a criminologist with a master's degree in criminology and criminal psychology. He is DSRM managing director. Contact him at dsrm@dsrm.kr.
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