Nicknamed the Hermit Kingdom, South Korea is a peninsular country whose only land border is a 2 kilometer-wide fenced strip known as the DMZ (de-militarized zone) that separates South Korea from Communist North Korea.
As the most Confucian of Asian societies, all facets of South Korean society, from business to family, reflect the Confucian belief that one’s actions reflect one’s place in society. Proper respect must be paid at all times, and even the Korean language reinforces strict social hierarchies by operating as a signifier of how people view one another with verb tense changing based on who is being spoken to.
This Confucian ideology is also evident in the country’s treatment of GLBT individuals. While South Korea has affirmed documents, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which espouse equal rights for all citizens, they have also failed to provide legal protection from discrimination for GLBT citizens. Moreover, even though South Korea has no laws criminalising same-sex attraction, the absence of such laws reflects a wider belief that Koreans simply are not, or cannot be, queer.
On October 2nd, 2007, the Ministry of Justice’s Bureau of Human Rights introduced draft legislation that prohibited discrimination on a number of grounds, including sexual orientation. Within weeks, conservative Christian groups were petitioning to have sexual orientation removed from the legislation, with one petition reportedly saying ‘homosexuals will try to seduce everyone, including adolescents; victims will be forced to become homosexuals; and sexual harassment by homosexuals will increase.’ As a result, sexual orientation was dropped from the law, prompting criticism from human rights groups.
‘The current version of the bill is a disappointment. A supposed landmark non-discrimination law has been hollowed out to exclude Koreans, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, who are in need of protection,’ said Jessica Stern, researcher in the LGBT program of Human Rights Watch.
Though the South Korean Supreme Court ruled that transgender individuals had the right to have their gender legally recognized after sex reassignment surgery, the recent non-discrimination legislation at no stage made provision for gender identity.
While overt persecution is rare, stories of employees losing their job after coming out are common, and many GLBT Koreans remain closeted in the absence of non-discrimination legislation.
Megan Smith, the News and Online Editor for OUTinPerth, worked as an instructor in English academies in South Korea.
