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www.groovekorea.com / May 2014 76 Nowhere to turn Victims of violence like Trinh report that of- ficials in Korea often use fear and shame to manipulate women into putting up with beat- ings and humiliation. Feminist sites and blogs such as the Korean Gender Café and Ilda de- scribe callous reactions from police and family members after a sexual assault. That was the experience of expat teacher Lori Michael, who arrived in Korea on Dec. 16 with a heavy backpack and an enormous suit- case on wheels that didn’t turn properly. Mi- chael, 33, spent roughly three years teaching in Korea and was returning for another stint. When she contacted Groove Korea on Dec. 20, she’d been back for only four days and had just filed a complaint with police against her Korean employer, the director of an En- glish-language hagwon in Jeonju. Soon after she started work, her employer took her to an elementary school for what turned out to be a job interview. When they were together in the school parking lot, things took an ugly turn. “He smacked my ass, rubbed my shoulders and punched me in the shoulders,” Michael told Groove by email correspondence. After he hit her, the director said, “In Korea, there is a problem with sexual harassment.” Michael asked her employer to release her from her contract so she could obtain the documents she needed to change jobs, but he wouldn’t cooperate unless she agreed to withdraw her complaint. She refused. “On the day I went to the police, not only did my director lock me out of the apartment and change the code, he also started to demand the 500,000 won of questionable money back,” she said. “I say questionable because right after he hit me, he had his wife send me that money and I asked why. He never had a comment for that.” Ten days after going to the police, she had run out of money and urgently needed assis- tance. So she got on the bus to Seoul, not sure of her next move. This was not Michael’s first emergency as a foreign woman in Korea. In 2011, while she was working at a hagwon in Uijeongbu, she went with some friends to a club in Seoul’s Hongdae neighborhood on Chuseok weekend. She left the club with a young man, whose name she never knew, and they went to a ho- tel together. There, Michael accepted a shot of liquor, drank it and passed out. When she woke up, she was alone. In the bathroom, she looked down, saw blood and realized she must have been drugged and raped. “All I remember is waking up by myself in the room all alone,” she said in an email. “I remember my abdominal area feeling really strange and awkward. Almost like a cramp.” She took a shower, got dressed and left as fast as she could. Police officers helped her retrieve her be- longings from the club, which had closed for the holiday, but they didn’t seem to under- stand her when she tried to tell them about the rape. “They just shrugged their shoulders like they didn’t care,” she wrote. She tried to report the incident again at a dif- ferent police station after she moved to Paju, west of Uijeongbu. “The cops just laughed at me and took me to about three different departments before taking me to the scene of the crime,” she said. “But it was already really late, and I was just so tired and emotionally exhausted and frustrated due to the language barrier. I just wanted to go back to my apartment.” Michael tried a third time, this time with the help of the U.S. Embassy, and a police department in Gangnam, Seoul, finally pro- cessed her complaint — though not without a judgmental comment from an officer about how long she had waited. Around this time she had trouble holding a job, with one school cheating her out of her wages. So on New Year’s Eve, she applied for a repatriation loan from the U.S. Embassy and was back on a plane the same day. She is now back in New Jersey, where she wrote to Groove Korea to recount the last details of her case. A week or so after the incident, she attend- ed a fireworks festival in Seoul with some ac- quaintances from Uijeongbu. They returned to Hongdae to see a band they liked, and Mi- chael felt safe enough with the group. But at the club, she had what she described as “the strangest/most awkward coincidence of my life.” “My entire body just froze like a deer in Edited by Jenny Na (jenny@groovekorea.com) INSIGHT A lack of services, combined with a neg- ative attitude toward victims from officials and society, means many of these cases go unreported and unprosecuted. Only 1.1 percent of sex crimes in Korea were re- ported in 2013, a drop from 4.1 percent in 2010, according to the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, Trinh met her husband in 2004 when she was working for a Korean grocery store in Vietnam. He was more than 20 years old- er than she, and they weren’t in love, but they liked each other. Her parents thought he would be a good husband because he seemed kind and helpful. He made two short visits to Vietnam before the couple got married in 2007. The following year, their daughter was born. The Vietnamese-born Korean citizen, who did not want to use her real name, told Groove Korea that the incident involv- ing her daughter sent her into a state of panic and despair. She went to the police on four separate occasions over the next several months and each time, the officers urged her to reconcile with her husband. Once, an officer even grabbed her hand and forced her fingerprints onto an official statement saying that she forgave him. Finally, after the fourth incident, she got help. This time the police brought her to an emergency shelter outside of her neighborhood in Seoul, where she lived for a month and a half starting in December 2012. She moved to Osan from Seoul the following March and her divorce became final that November. Trinh is currently struggling to raise her daughter alone. She makes 1.2 million won per month at her cleaning job, and rent and kindergarten fees eat up half her salary. She has applied for a low-interest loan from the government, and hopes it will give her more financial freedom and allow her to get a better apartment. In a file folder she carries receipts, invoices and legal documents — including a copy of the apology letter she received from her husband when he locked her out of the house. Despite her ordeal, Trinh is happy to be living in peace and wants to stay here and raise her daughter as a Korean. She said her daughter is very smart, speaks both Korean and Vietnamese and likes to draw. Like the proud mother she is, Trinh showed pictures of the little girl’s artwork on her phone — bright pink marker draw- ings of a female figure. ‘Was she drinking that night? What Was she Wearing? … all those things blame the victim. nobody is saying “Why did this man rape her?” or “Why did she rape this man?”’ — vanessa sae-hee burke