hankyoreh

Prisoners exercise at Seoul Nambu Correctional Facility in Guro district. (Hankyoreh file photo)

“It’s okay.” Her uncle mouthed the words slowly through the police car window. Choi Mi-young, 20, had lived with him ever since her parents had divorced when she was a child. Three years later, she still can’t erase the shock of that day.

She was in her second year of high school when he came to find her in a panic. To Choi, the man who had promised not to marry before she did was something more than just a father figure. She raced home to find four police officers in their house. Her uncle, a taxi driver, asked them if he could at least leave his keys and the company share of his fares in the building’s security office. The police shook their heads, and handcuffed him as Choi looked on.

“It was a horrible shock,” she recalled. “In the TV shows, they cover the handcuffs with a handkerchief . . . but the police just marched him into the car.”

“I had no way of knowing if or when my uncle would be coming back home. It all felt so frustrating and bleak,” she continued.

The trauma that continues to haunt Choi even today is a common phenomenon for the children of convicts in South Korea. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), adopted by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, states that the rights of prisoners’ children are to be considered at all stages from the parent’s arrest through law enforcement, imprisonment, and judicial proceedings. In South Korea, the very concept of “convicts‘ children” goes largely unspoken - never mind any survey on the situations they face. Recent years have seen a number of horrific child abuse cases in which parents have killed their own son or daughter and abandoned the body. The focus is always on the atrocious nature of the crimes - with little attention turned toward the surviving children left behind. It’s a silent sickness that afflicts young people who are afraid to even make their voices heard because of the stigma attached to being the children of criminals.

After his father went to prison three years ago, 17-year-old Lee Jin-yong, who lives in Gyeonggi Province, started living with his grandmother. But his grandmother recently passed away, leaving him all alone in the world. But he did not inform anyone of this fact.

As a result, no one at the school or in the local government was aware of Lee’s situation.

“In a survey we conducted of inmates at the Seongdong Detention Center last year, there was one man in prison who had been raising a 12-year-old, a six-year-old, and a three-year-old following the death of his wife,” said Shin Yeon-hee, a professor of social welfare at Sungkyul University. “The kids were there when their dad was arrested, and they were left alone for a month. There were also instances in which dads didn’t know what had happened to their children.”

One evening last year, 10-year-old Yoo Min-jae wanted to know why it was taking his dad so much longer than usual to get home from work. Min-jae‘s mom told him that his dad had gone overseas to make some money, and Min-jae still believes that.

Min-jae’s dad had been supporting a family of five with the 2 million won (US$1,700) he earned doing construction work. One year ago, he was sent to prison for embezzlement. While Min-jae has the good fortune to live with his 28-year-old mom, his dad‘s incarceration has brought big changes for the family, which rents an apartment in the suburbs of Seoul.

With their source of income gone, the family has started to fall behind on its rent. Min-jae’s mother would like to work at a restaurant while the kids are at school, but back problems keep her from doing so.

By now, the family has run out of the emergency living allowance it received from the district office. They do not even have enough money to pay the bus fare and activity fee at the daycare center that Min-jae’s younger siblings attend.

Not long ago, Min-jae hit one of his classmates. During a meeting with Min-jae’s homeroom teacher, his mom was dismayed to hear that her son wasn‘t “normal.” All she could feel was guilt for the unstable environment that she and her husband had made.

“It’s true that my husband made a mistake, but the rest of the family didn‘t do anything wrong. The rest of us have to keep going, right?” Min-jae’s mom said.

She has prepared documents to apply for government assistance for single parents, which will bring in about 100,000 won (US$86) a month.

Hardly anyone in South Korea’s schools, local government offices and non-profits shows an interest in the children of incarcerated parents, the children who are left behind when one of their parents commits a crime and goes to prison. Despite the crisis these children face, they are practically invisible, even inside welfare programs designed to protect vulnerable members of society.

These children are afraid of being shunned for being the children of perpetrators. When their parents are ripped away from them, they are plunged into financial difficulties and psychological anxiety, which makes them victims, too.

According to social workers who pay attention to children of incarcerated parents and groups who provided them with support, the greatest difficulty that these children suffer is the effect of their forced separation.

As growing children experience disruptive changes in their environment at an age when they need the loving attention of their parents, they are liable to have trouble supporting themselves or to be exposed to juvenile delinquency and crime.

“Studies in Korea show that 30% of children are placed under new guardians when a parent is incarcerated, and more than 20% live apart from their siblings,” Shin said.

Indeed, four out of 10 convicts who are doing time are divorced, while 16% of convicts’ families are recipients of basic livelihood benefits, which is quite high considering that only 2.9% of the entire population receive such benefits (as of 2015).

The children of incarcerated parents are often reluctant to tell others about their dilemma and to ask for help because of the social stigma this might bring.

Kim Ji-yeong, 18, has not told anyone except her teachers at school that her father is serving a life sentence. Kim’s mother left the family when she was young.

After her father went to prison, Kim and her siblings stayed with an aunt for a while and now live with their grandmother.

The family has to make ends meet with 1 million won a month. The money is earned by Kim’s grandmother, who manages to run a restaurant despite her ailments, and her brother, one year younger than her, who works a part-time job on the weekend.

But even Kim’s younger siblings and her grandmother are afraid of being branded as the kids of a criminal.

“Unless the kids can hire a lawyer, the reality is that from the moment their guardian is arrested there’s nowhere they can go to find the most basic information,” said Choi Joon-young.

Choe is the general manager of a Christian organization called Sejinhoe that has been supporting the families of convicts for more than a decade.

Names of sources in this article have been changed to protect their privacy

By Park Su-ji, staff reporter

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