The Case of Yoon-a
At the end of 2011, just as school violence was about to hit the national headlines, ‘Yoon-a’ was detained for one month at a ‘Juvenile Classification and Examination Center’ southwest of Seoul on school violence-related charges. Yoon-a had no prior criminal record and this was the first time she was put under police investigation. Like the K-pop boy-band Infinite, there were seven members in her ‘il-jin’ or ‘delinquent’ peer group. While her fellow group members were in the 2nd grade of high school, Yoon-a was herself in the 3rd grade. Her seniority bestowed upon her a degree of authority and power—which she both used and misused. The group members all knew each other from middle school and had maintained close and intimate contact after entering high school. Each of them had, to varying degrees, engaged in extortion by threatening their 1st grade juniors to hand over money.
‘Sung-kyu,’ the ‘jjang’ or leader of the group, threatened his juniors by telling them they had 10 days to hand over 100,000 won, ‘or else.’1 Another member, ‘Dong-woo,’ extorted 20,000 won on one occasion and 30,000 won on another. He also threatened a ‘friend’ who had sniffed glue in a karaoke bar by telling him that unless he handed over 470,000 won, he would tell their school about his glue-sniffing ways. Another member, ‘Woo-hyun,’ twice extorted money from the main victim of this case, ‘Do-yeon.’ And both ‘Ho-won’ and ‘Myung-soo’ threated their juniors to hand over money. Myung-soo also instigated an assault on their juniors, when one day he collected all of them together, including Do-yeon, and said:
Since you are all clueless 2 then who is going to be the scapegoat of the group to be beaten?
Do-yeon volunteered to play the role of the scapegoat. Myung-soo then used a bat and hit her, and also used a decorative knife to hit her multiple times around the hip region. He also hit her once in the chest. Like an Army Sergeant, he then ordered three of these juniors to lie down, in the push-up position, and kicked their stomachs five times.
In regards to the assault case that led to Yoon-a’s detention, she asked Myung-soo to help her ‘fix’ the behaviour of Do-yeon because she had been rude to Yoon-a and had—in an act of ‘twet-dam-hwa’ or backstabbing—said derogatory things about her to others. On the way home after class one day, Yoon-a ordered six 1st grade juniors, including Do-yeon, to follow them to an empty underground parking lot. Like an Army Sergeant, she ordered them to stand in a line (like soldiers) and, on her behalf, her il-jin friends hit their juniors’ head and chest with their closed fists. Later on, Yoon-a asked her fellow group members to hit these juniors after they were ‘not polite enough’ to her. After the third time they were taken to the parking lot and put in a line and beaten, Do-yeon reported them to the police. Leader Sung-kyu figured out that it was Do-yeon who had ‘squealed’ on them, and so took her to a male toilet at school and pocked her thighs with chopsticks; while another member acted as lookout to make sure the coast was clear of authority figures.
‘We didn’t hit them seriously. We didn’t leave any bruises or injuries,’ Yoon-a said in her defence. She subsequently apologised to Do-yeon and, according to Yoon-a, they were, surprisingly, said to then ‘get along well.’ Asked to write what she thinks constitutes a ‘real friendship,’ Yoon-a wrote:
Real friends lead friends in the right direction. They never let them do bad behaviour, and are someone who can help each other when they are having trouble.
The Case of Mi-young
Unlike Yoon-a, ‘Mi-young’ had faced prior police investigations for juvenile offending, including: The joint assault and confinement charge that led to her most recent detention occurred after Mi-young ran away from home and was living with her boyfriend, ‘Ji-yong,’ and ‘Chae-rin,’ a female acquaintance who had also run away from home. Chae-rin was alleged to have taken 100,000 won from Mi-young. Mi-young, Ji-yong, and a female accomplice named ‘Min-zee’ confronted Chae-rin and told her to return the money, ‘or else.’ Mi-young became angry after Chae-rin did not reply to this demand and reacted vengefully by pulling her hair and slapping her face three times with her right hand. Then with her right foot she stomped on Chae-rin’s face three times. Ji-yong, meanwhile, threw a roll of toilet paper at her face, hit her on the cheek eight times with his left hand, hit the back of her head, and stomped on her stomach and thighs. Min-zee then pulled her hair and kicked her. After assaulting her, they told Chae-rin she could not leave the apartment until she had paid back the money. To prevent her from leaving they slept in front of the entrance of the tiny apartment. And when they went out they took her with them. The total time of confinement was 44 hours and 40 minutes.
- 1.June, 2010. Joint Assault.
- 2.January, 2012. Joint Assault.
- 3.March, 2012. Special Burglary.
- 4.March, 2012. Assault and Special Burglary.
- 5.May, 2012. Special Burglary.
- 6.May, 2012. Joint Assault and Confinement.3
Like Yoon-a, Mi-young was asked to answer the question ‘What do you think is a real friendship?’ ‘If a friend does something wrong,’ wrote Mi-young, ‘I will lead her on the right path.’
Contrary to the allegations against her, Mi-young claimed she originally told Chae-rin that she did not need to pay her back the 100,000 won. Mi-young claimed Chae-rin then swore at her and so Mi-young reacted angrily by hitting her (stopping only after Chae-rin’s nose began to bleed). ‘The victim kept bothering me’, wrote Mi-young of her motivation and her seeming lack of self-control. ‘I couldn’t bear it anymore so I committed the delinquency.’
Mi-young also denied the confinement charge, claiming Chae-rin stayed at the apartment of her own free will. She also denied the delinquency related to her other cases, claiming that she was living with her boyfriend and thus her delinquent behaviour was simply the result of having to survive on the street. The classification officer who classified, examined, and analysed Mi-young’s case was of the opinion that she ‘lacks awareness’ about the true nature of her delinquency.
The Case of Myung-bo
‘Myung-bo’ was sent to the Detention Centre after being charged with extortion, assault, and threatening with an accomplice (a more severe charge than threatening someone on your own). To help finance their life on the street, Myung-bo and his two close friends would use the Cyworld SNS messenger service to ‘ask’ juniors to give them money. They would tell their juniors things like: ‘I need money to fix my motorbike.’ If these juniors replied that they did not have money to hand over they would be ordered to ask their juniors to give them money. If no money was provided, either by their juniors or their junior’s-juniors, they would be threatened and assaulted, which included hitting and kicking them in the chest, stomach, and thigh. Through this technique they acquired money on 19 separate occasions, totalling 73,000 won (on average, just 3,842 won per occasion). On two occasions Myung-bo acted ‘out of character’ for his contemporaries by threatening one of the boys by himself.
One way to conceptualize this junior-senior distinction—or power imbalance between students—is to reference a scene in the film ‘Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.’ In the scene Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi Wan Kanobi, and Jar Jar Binks are travelling through the Naboo Ocean when a large fish attacks their submarine-like ship. As this large fish is about to swallow the ship, the fish is suddenly eaten by an even bigger fish. Gui-Gon (played by Liam Neeson) responds by saying: ‘There’s always a bigger fish.’ That is, in one context a person is a senior to the junior below him/her, but in another context he/she is the junior to the senior above him/her. All, however, prefer being a senior, or the bigger fish. They live, after all, in a ‘junior vs. senior society’ caught, or transitioning, between its (closed) hierarchical Confucian and patriarchal ‘solid’ past, whose shadow-s...