hankyoreh

Cartoon by Kwon Beom-cheol

Print and television interviews given by Seo Ji-hyeon, a prosecutor with the Tongyeong Branch of the Changwon District Prosecutors’ Office, have produced a truly explosive response. Seo’s testimony has simultaneously revealed the duplicity of the public prosecutors, who given immense power to carry out justice, and the structural sexual discrimination in South Korean society, in which even women in the most prestigious of professional fields are the victims of sex crimes and are forced to suffer in silence. The likely reason why this issue dominated social media and fired up a petition on the Blue House’s website on Jan. 30 is because of people’s sympathy and anger.

Seo identified Choi Gyo-il, former chief of the Justice Ministry Prosecution Bureau and a sitting lawmaker [with the Liberty Korea Party] as the person who had given Seo a punitive job posting in order to cover up the sexual harassment incident. Choi claimed not to remember anything and insisted he was unrelated to the incident, but this turned out to be a flagrant lie.

Lim Eun-jeong, a prosecutor who had mentioned this incident on the prosecutors’ internal network in July 2017, said that “the chief prosecutor who berated me for making a fuss when the person concerned was keeping quiet was Choi Gyo-il.” It’s remarkable how brazenly Choi assumed he could just get away with this simply by denying everything.

Initially, the Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutors’ Office responded the same way they always have when allegations are made about sex crimes in the workplace. On the record, they say the incident is too old to investigate and that they could find no evidence of punitive personnel decisions, while off the record they insinuate that the claims are motivated by employee resentment over their work assignment.

During the five years since 2012, there have been 34 case of public servants in the Justice Ministry and the Supreme Prosecutors' Office being disciplined for sexual offenses, but given the organizational culture there, it’s very likely that not all the sex crimes are actually included in the statistics. In the interview, Seo said that a case of one prosecutor sexually assaulting another had been covered up, too. Her allegations show that vulgar remarks constituting sexual harassment and sexual discrimination – remarks that we would rather not even print here – are an everyday occurrence not only at drinking parties but even in the workplace itself.

The most shocking part about this case is that the sexual harassment occurred openly at a funeral, a public event, as numerous prosecutors, not to mention the Minister of Justice, were looking on. “It was so surreal that I wondered whether I was hallucinating,” Seo said during an interview.

Not only the perpetrator himself, former Bureau Chief Ahn Tae-geun, but former Minister of Justice Lee Kwi-nam who was sitting next to them and the rest of the prosecutors who were present need come forward with the truth right now. Remaining silent about a sex crime is not organizational security, but criminal collusion. We hope that this incident will be an opportunity to break the conspiracy of silence about the sexual discrimination and sex crimes that are so widespread in our society.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]