"The Victim is Now Returning to Her Homeland as a Corpse" by Junseo Park

"The victim is now returning to her homeland as a corpse,” stated Judge Kang Dong-hyeok, judge of a murder case that took place on November 16, 2019. According to court records, Shin, the husband, stabbed his wife 10 times in the chest and stomach with a knife. After she passed, Shin covered her body in plastic, put her into his car, and drove to a persimmon orchard in Wanju County, North Jeolla Province, 124 miles away from their home in Yangju. She met her murderer through a matchmaker. 

The murdered wife was a 29-year-old Vietnamese woman who was one of the thousands of Vietnamese women set up by matchmakers to marry South Korean men. South Korea encourages these matchmaking services between foreign women and South Korean men, with even local authorities subsidizing it. In the 1980s, to address the aging population and decreasing population, the Korean government-funded private marriage brokers who could introduce bachelor farmers to ethnically Korean women in China, paying the brokers up to $5,700 per marriage. The expected outcome of these funds was for more Korean men to have children and to grow the Korean workforce. Decades later, brides who were no longer ethnically Korean came from countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Cambodia under the broker’s false promises of a wealthy life. 

According to South Korea’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, the average time between the expected partners’ first meeting and their actual marriage was just 4.4 days. Foreign women enter a marriage that will legally bind them with their spouse without being knowledgeable about the consequences of the partnership. The women are shortsighted by the promises of the spouse and the broker, who promise economic prosperity and lavish living, something that is impossible to obtain in their home country. What they do not know is that those promises are meaningless and that there is little freedom for migrant wives because of the Korean patriarchal family structure. Instead, these wives are trapped under the legal chains of marriage and become victims of discrimination, domestic violence, and even murder at the hands of their husbands. According to a 2017 poll by the National Human Rights Commission, more than 42% of foreign wives in Korea reported having suffered domestic violence including physical, verbal, sexual, and financial abuse. Of these victims, 67.9% were raped by their husbands. 

The dominant mechanism that infringes the rights of foreign wives is the notion of transactional marriage. Transactional marriages often disproportionately skew relationships into ones of dependency and enforce domesticity, so wives become financially dependent on husbands and have no real alternative but to obey their husband’s beck and call. This can range from not contacting her family, and friends and only staying at home, to sexual requests that she may not want to engage in.

Whatever the case, it is horrendous that one spouse is stripped away from her choices as a result of the dependency that has been established. Furthermore, for migrant wives to attain residency rights, husbands need to renew their wives’ temporary spousal F-6 visas to guarantee communication capabilities every three years. South Korean husbands and families can manipulate, threaten, and exploit their wives through this legal authority and stop them from obtaining citizenship or visa status if the wife wants separation. 

Nevertheless, Korea still embraces brave women who can break the glass ceiling. Migrant wives protested domestic violence in front of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea. In addition, a video on social media showing a Vietnamese woman being abused by her husband has sparked indignation among South Koreans. After being routinely subjected to abuse by her husband, a migrant wife finally recorded a video by placing her phone on a diaper bag on the living room table. After analyzing the video, the Yeongam Police Station in South Jeolla Province placed the 36-year-old husband under emergency arrest. The Korean patriarchal martial culture can not be simply resolved. However, domestic abuse, rape, and financial coercion are fundamentally flawed. Continuous protests and migrant wives speaking up with legal protection must be encouraged, and migrant women must be able to acquire citizenship on their own when the authenticity of their marriage is recognized. If we don’t support the migrant wives risking their lives to speak out, who will?

Work Cited 

Choi, Ga-Young, and Soo-Jung Byoun. “Domestic Violence against Migrant Women in South Korea: Addressing the Needs of a Uniquely Situated Victim Population in Domestic Violence Policy.” International Social Work, vol. 57, no. 6, Nov. 2014, pp. 645–660, doi:10.1177/0020872812448492. 

"How South Korea's Migrant Wives Are Breaking The Glass Ceiling". BBC News, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57716704. Accessed 27 Sep 2022. 

Julia Hollingsworth, CNN. "She Moved Countries For Her Husband. She Didn't Return Home Alive". CNN, 2022, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/02/asia/foreign-wives-south-korea-intl-hnk-dst/index.html. Accessed 2 Aug 2022. 

Kim, Hyun Sil. "International Marriage Migrant Women In Korea". Korean Journal Of Women Health Nursing, vol 14, no. 4, 2022, pp. 248-256., https://kjwhn.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.4069/kjwhn.2008.14.4.248. Accessed 4 Aug 2022. "Shirley Hu, "Why Do Migrant Wives Have

Difficulty Addressing Domestic Abuse In South Korea ?" · AAAS 482D · Binghamton University Libraries". Digitalprojects.Binghamton.Edu, 2022, https://digitalprojects.binghamton.edu/s/gender_health/page/SK_migrant_wives_abuse. Accessed 2 Aug 2022. 

Sil, Kim. "International Marriage Migrant Women In Korea". Korean J Women Health Nurs, vol 14, no. 4, 2008, pp. 248-256., https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBe an.artiId=ART001297400. Accessed 5 Aug 2022. 

"South Korea Bans Men With History Of Abuse From Marrying Foreign Women". The Guardian, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/11/south-korea-bans-men-with-history-of-abuse -from-marrying-foreign-women. Accessed 2 Aug 2022. 

"Video Of Migrant Woman Being Abused By Husband Incites Public Outrage". English.Hani.Co.Kr, 2022, http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/900962.html. Accessed 4 Aug 2022.