[Column] Lessons Left by the Jeong Sun-shin Incident

Jung Soon-shin's Son School Violence, Overlapping with The Glory
"Yeon-jin's Dad Responsible for Police Investigation" Public Outcry
Numerous Moon-dong Issues... Included in Education Reform

"No one is going to protect you, Dong-eun. If you say that in five letters, what is it? Socially vulnerable."

In the drama The Glory, which depicts the revenge of a school violence victim, the perpetrator Park Yeon-jin said this while bullying the victim Moon Dong-eun. After Dong-eun suffered violence from Park Yeon-jin and her gang and reported it to the police, the perpetrators were all released shortly after Yeon-jin’s mother, who was an alumna of the police chief, intervened, and Dong-eun’s poor mother accepted a small settlement.

The cruel scene where even parents do not protect the "socially vulnerable" victims of bullying resurfaced amid public outcry that "Yeon-jin’s father almost took charge of the police investigation." This overlapped with the case of lawyer Jeong Soon-shin, who was appointed head of the National Investigation Headquarters of the National Police Agency but fell from grace due to her son’s school violence incident, paralleling the school violence depicted in the drama. Just as Park Yeon-jin’s school violence report was covered up through connections with high-ranking officials, lawyer Jeong became involved in the lawsuit to cancel the disciplinary action against Jeong’s son, who was Yeon-jin’s father.

According to the ruling on the cancellation lawsuit of lawyer Jeong’s son A’s disciplinary decision, teachers testified at the school violence committee that they were unaware of the perpetrator’s violence. While some classmates criticized Jeong’s violence, there was no intervention by the teachers. They missed the opportunity to promptly discover the school violence and protect the victim.

Was the victimized student the only one extremely unfortunate? Sadly, many victims similar to Moon Dong-eun exist in other schools as well. Physical violence cases such as the 2006 Chungbuk Cheongju middle school bullying incident, where classmates were burned with a hair iron and gang-beaten, and the 2021 Gyeongnam Yangsan bullying case, where foreign-nationality middle school students were gang-beaten and videos were recorded and distributed, have been reported even recently. Over the past five years, the number of students who suffered school violence reached 130,000 according to Ministry of Education statistics alone. Countless cases of unresolved violence remain. According to the 2022 first school violence survey analysis report published by the Korea Educational Development Institute, among 39,396 students who reported school violence, 13,889 (35.1%) answered that their cases were not resolved despite reporting the incidents.

At this point, shouldn’t the school violence issue be included as a key pillar of the education reform agenda promoted by President Yoon? It seems unlikely to be resolved by one-off responses such as lowering the age of criminal responsibility for juvenile offenders pushed by the Ministry of Justice, expanding character, sports, and arts education planned by the Ministry of Education, or reflecting school violence records in college admissions. Reform-level changes are necessary to establish effective protection measures for students reporting school violence and to build a proactive response system involving schools and teachers.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.