hankyoreh

By Lee Kyung-mi, staff reporter

Han, 10, grew up in a needy family in Tongyeong in South Gyeongsang Province. Her family was busy working for a living and struggled to spend enough time with her.

“Sex offenders gather in lower-income areas. They seek the targets weaker than them and little kids are particularly vulnerable to sexual crimes,” said Park Hyung-min, a researcher at the Korean Institute of Criminology.

In recent years, child sexual abuse cases had occurred mostly in lower-income residential areas such as multi-household residences, on the fringes of the city or in the countryside. The children in those regions often lack supervision by parents and the local community.

Lee, 13, a kidnapped middle school student in 2010, lived in a multiplex housing unit in Busan. Heo, 11, who was also kidnapped in 2008, resided in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Daegu.

Hye-jin and Ye-seul, both 12, went missing in 2007 from a street near multiplex houses in Anyang, Gyeonggi province. Similarly in 2006, Heo, 11, disappeared from alley near a traditional market in Yongsan, Seoul.

According to the Research on the Actual Conditions of Children and Adolescents in Korea, more than 1.02 million kids are uncared for. Ministry of Health & Welfare reported that last year 1,783 cases of neglected children were reported to the National Child Protection Agency. This number was triple the 2001 total of 672 cases.

Family disorganization, which comes along with poverty, makes children more vulnerable to sexual crimes.

According to a 2008 study by the Government Youth Commission, almost 30% of sexual crimes committed against children younger than 13 occurred between 2 pm to 5 pm, the time between when children get back from school and before their parents are home from work.

The experts are pointing out that the society needs a Care Network for all children to reduce the child sexual crimes. Manager Baek Mi-soon of Korea Sexual Violence Relief Center said, “Like the cases of foreign countries that the kids in lower grades should be accompanied with adults in the way to and from school, we need to reinforce the care system of local community.”

Kyunghee University Professor of Sociology Hwang Seung-yeon said, “A comprehensive government safety net is needed for vulnerable children, especially those from lower-income families, since the local community can only provide limited protection.”

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