An Unprovoked Crime or A Misogyny Crime?
An Unprovoked Crime or A Misogyny Crime?
  • reporter Park Jee-won
  • 승인 2020.07.14 18:52
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▲Suspect of the Seoul Station attack being transported from Seoul Yongsan Police Station for further investigation / NEWSIS
▲Suspect of the Seoul Station attack being transported from Seoul Yongsan Police Station for further investigation / NEWSIS

On May 26, a 30-year-old man assaulted a woman and fled at Seoul Station. He approached the woman, hit her shoulder, and attacked her with his fist. She collapsed and hit her head on the floor, and fractured her left cheekbone. She was also diagnosed with a 1.5 centimeter tear next to her left eye.
Furthermore, on June 10, another woman waiting for the bus was indiscriminately assaulted by a man, and a woman who was trying to stop the violence was also assaulted.
Amid such increase in violence against women, various points of view have been suggested on the definition of “Misogyny crime”.
The Seoul Station case has spread online with the hashtag “#Seoul Station Misogyny Crime”, and voices that the case should be seen as a crime targeted at women, not an unprovoked attack targeting an unspecified number of people, have been raised.
Yoon Kim Ji-young, professor at Konkuk University’s Institute of Body&Culture, said in an interview with Yonhap News, “It is more accurate to call it ‘Seoul Station Misogyny Crime’. If you call it an unprovoked crime even though it is an assault on a woman, it can cloud the awareness of a problem.”
On the other hand, some voiced concerns that hastily calling a case a misogyny crime can raise recognition that women can be subject to hatred. Lee Soo-jung, professor of criminal psychology at Kyunggi University, said on CBS’s Radio channel “Sisajaki Jeong Gwan-yong” that “If the term ‘Misogyny crime’ is widely used, it can raise awareness that women can become victims of hate crimes, and so we should be careful using the term.”
Experts say that observing and understanding the social structure is the only way to install proper countermeasures and prevent the recurrence of assault crimes targeting women.
Kim Min-jung, Ph.D. in the college of social science at Seoul National University, claimed in her paper, Things ‘Mudjima Crime’ Didn’t Ask Hatred as The Products of Power-Knowledge,  that violent crimes of economically vulnerable people and mentally ill people were overly generalised and dismissed as unprovoked crime, and, as a result, the stories of women victims were deleted. She pointed out that if the perpetrator has a mental illness, media defines the crime as an unprovoked crime too easily, even if there is a motive or context for the crime to be caused by misogyny.