South Korea justice system, where truth can be a crime
Seoul: As soon as the Seoul office worker told police she had been raped, her attacker struck back with a barrage of complaints against her under South Korea’s criminal defamation law, which states that truth is not necessarily a defence.
“He kept filing complaints against me nonstop, accusing me of defamation, insult, perjury, intimidation and even sexual harassment,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only as “D” for fear of her personal safety.
“For months, I couldn’t eat,” she told AFP. “I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t sleep. I felt like I was trapped in a swamp I could never escape.”
The man was later convicted of rape and sentenced to two years in prison, while all the accusations against D were dismissed.
But the legal quagmire she faced is not rare in the South, where defamation laws make libel a crime and stating the truth can still be an offence if it is deemed to have tarnished others’ social reputation.
A growing number of alleged sex abusers are seeking to use legal actions of their own to force victims into silence or into dropping their accusations.
Filing a report to police is not in itself grounds for a defamation action, but if a rape victim goes public with their allegations, a criminal complaint can be filed against them.
And if the sexual assault case is later dropped by police or prosecutors, or the accused is acquitted, the victim can be pursued for false accusations.
That creates fertile ground for so- called “revenge accusations” by alleged abusers, driving many women into silence, say legal experts and women’s groups.
“The whole system has a chilling effect on women,” said Seo Hye- jin of the Korean Women Lawyers Association.
“Many abusers openly use the threats of lawsuits as an intimidation tactic, saying, ‘ I’ll drop the false accusation and defamation suits against you if you drop the sex abuse complaint against me’.”
Despite South Korea’s technological and economic advances, patriarchal values endure in its society, and it is regularly at the bottom of OECD rankings for the gender pay gap or female presence in senior corporate roles.
It has an unusually high proportion of female murder victims at 52 per cent, according to the UN Office of Drugs and Crime.
That is far above the US and China, both around 22 per cent, and even higher than the 41 per cent for India, which is often in the spotlight over violence against women.