hankyoreh

23

By Seo Young-ji, staff reporter

“I lived in a prison without bars.”

This is how Kwon Oh-joon, 42, who spent 10 years at Kkottongnae in Eumseong, North Chungcheong Province, described his life in the facility. In 1996, Kwon got in a car accident, and the resulting neck injury was classified as a class-one disability.

At the recommendation of his younger sister, Kwon was admitted into the facility. From the moment he entered, Kwon’s freedom was gone. He spent most of his time lying down in a room that was only 82m2 in size, crammed with 24 bunk beds.

Meals were provided at set times. Breakfast was served at 5:30 am, lunch at 12:30 pm, and dinner at 4:30 pm. There was nothing to eat after dinner. The only time they could buy something was when workers from the supermarket visited the facility once a month.

With the assistance of the Center for Disabled People’s Independent Living, Kwon was able to leave Kkottongnae in 2011. He was forced to sign an agreement promising not to return after he left. “I left the facility because I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life that way,” Kwon said.

Kkottongnae was the only stop on Pope Francis’s itinerary during his visit to Korea that provoked controversy. Established in 1976, the facility is home to around 5,000 disabled and elderly patients. While there were some who praised the pope for delivering a message of hope to the patients when he visited Kkottongnae on Aug. 16, quite a few were worried about his visit to a large group home that bucks the trend in disabled human rights to reject confinement and protection and embrace deinstitutionalization and independent living.

Advocacy groups for the disabled who call for deinstitutionalization argue that it is difficult to guarantee human rights inside a facility. There are also many cases in which the decision to admit someone to a facility is made by the family. Once admitted, residents essentially lose the freedom of movement.

As of Dec. 2013, 31,152 disabled people were living in public or private facilities. This number would increase significantly if unregistered facilities were also taken into account.

The experience of Cho Seong-mi, 33, who spent eight years at Kkottongnae, was quite similar to Kwon’s. Like Kwon, Cho broke her neck in a car accident in 1999 and was recognized as having a class-one disability. Her life inside the facility turned out to be the opposite of what she had hoped for. During a three month “adjustment period,” she was not allowed to leave the facility, receive any visitors, or even use the public pay phone.

Even after this initial period, things did not change very much, Cho said. Thirteen people stayed in a room that was only 50m2, lying down most of the time. If they wanted to go outside, they had to have someone to watch them.

Cho was introduced to the Independence for the Disabled Support Center by someone who left the facility before she did, and the center helped her to get out of Kkottongnae, too. Currently, Cho is staying at an independent living home. She is helped by a personal assistant from 8 am to 11 pm and is trying to become self-sufficient.

The level of welfare for the disabled in Korea means it is not practical to try to have all of the disabled deinstitutionalized and left to live on their own. The government provides little in the way of residential support and resettlement aid, which are the most important factors in helping the disabled become self-sufficient. The Ministry of Health and Welfare only operates 197 independent experience homes and 685 joint living homes in the country. Currently, only 2,766 disabled people live in joint living homes.

The personal assistant program for the disabled also has a serious shortage of funding. According to statistics provided by the ministry, there were 364,507 people with class-one and class-two disabilities at the end of 2013 who were eligible to receive assistance from the program, but only 6,435 (16%) of them were actually receiving assistance.

“The government’s welfare policy for the disabled is still oriented on facility-centered welfare. In order for the disabled to be integrated into the local community and to live with us, policy needs to shift to allocate more funds to small-scale facilities,” said Yeom Hyung-guk, a lawyer with Gonggam Human Rights Law Foundation, on Aug. 20.

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