America usually gets all the press and the bad reputation for her violent citizenry, but South Korea is the East Asian spot where you can see a lot more action.
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Though I now live in Korea, I was born and raised in America, a place widely proclaimed and often imagined as home to the world’s most violent citizenry. For those who have never been, thoughts of the U.S. often conjure images of people walking the streets, armed with semi-automatic weapons, poppin’ caps into old ladies out walking their poodles.
And yet, having grown up in The States nearly all my life (even in seedy neighborhoods such as San Francisco’s Tenderloin and the Mission District) I can’t recall seeing more than ten fist fights on the street, nor was I ever confronted with a gun –and I can be pretty obnoxious.
Sure, there are exceptions, pockets of violence in the inner city and within certain economic classes and age groups, but overall they are just that, exceptions. And when people speak of gun deaths in America, they neglect to point out that over 50% of those numbers are people killing themselves, not killing others.
In short, growing up in the U.S. I rarely witnessed much in the way of public violence on display.
And then I moved to Korea. This is where the action is.
Fighting on the street in South Korea is the norm. I honestly can’t count the number of fisticuffs, shoving matches or downright brawls I have seen in my eight years on the peninsula. And the participants I’ve watched going at it widely vary; all ages, and genders, men beating their women as others stroll by, and even a woman with a newborn baby on her back fighting off two drunken women with her shoe.
And this doesn’t even count all the fights I hear outside my window (in the highly affluent Haeundae district) in the wee hours of the morning that are so common I no longer look outside to see what is happening anymore.
You can chalk this all up to alcohol, which I will get to later, but to what do we attribute the increasing violence in the schools?
The Kids are Not Alright
While the test-result oriented Korean schools are heralded the world over, Korea’s education system is riddled with violence where both teachers and students lord power over the kids. It seems that every few weeks the Korean (and now worldwide) media run stories on South Korean kids bullying each other or teachers abusing the kids –at times to the point of suicide.
Thankfully, the national government is stepping in where school administrators often turn the other way and is now jailing these little bully thugs and firing abusive teachers.
The school administration turning the other way is evident in this video where the vice principle actually questions why a teacher who brutally beat an elementary student should even be punished at all. (Be warned, the subject matter is graphic)
Read the rest at Idle Wordship Blog
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