Jennifer Lee

Lunar | Stalked and killed: why can’t South Korea do more to protect women?

Last week, a young woman was killed before the court could rule on her alleged stalker, the latest in a string of women stalked and killed in South Korea

With a new anti-stalking law criticised for loopholes and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family on the chopping block, South Korea is failing its women

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Women mourn the death of a woman killed by her stalker, outside the women’s toilet in Seoul’s Sindang Station, on September 19. Photo: AFP

Jennifer Lee

Published: 2:45pm, 23 Sep 2022

On September 14, a Seoul Metro employee patrolling at Sindang Station died after being stabbed in the women’s loo. The suspect arrested was a colleague – and her alleged stalker. Her murder has led to an outpouring of not just grief across South Korea, but also anger at what some see as a failure to protect the 28-year-old woman, despite her many distress signals and appeals for help.

In 2018, the two became colleagues at Seoul Metro, which operates most of the subway lines passing through the capital. According to the police, 31-year-old Jeon Joo-hwan was accused of stalking her from late 2019. She sued him last October; the same month he was forced to quit his job.

The court rejected her application for a pre-trial detention warrant, citing a lack of evidence that he would try to flee or destroy evidence.

Jeon was accused of stalking her throughout the police investigation, and she filed another complaint in January. But the day before he was due to hear the court’s verdict on the charges of stalking and illegally filming her, she was dead.

This isn’t the first time that a victim of stalking has ended up dead in South Korea. Last June, Kim Byung-chan, 36, was sentenced to 35 years in jail for stabbing his former girlfriend to death in her flat – after she had reported him to the police for stalking her after their breakup. Last January, the high court upheld a life sentence for triple murderer and stalker Kim Tae-hyon, 26, for killing a woman he had met online, along with her mother and younger sister in their flat.

This isn’t even the first time that a woman was murdered in a subway loo. Many have drawn parallels between the Sindang Station case and 2016 Gangnam Station murder. Kim Seong-min, 34, stabbed to death a 23-year-old woman in the public loo near Exit 10; he was put away for 30 years. He had confessed to the police that he did not know her at all – he had killed her out of vengeance against women in general for looking down on him.

Handwritten notes are displayed near the entrance to a women’s toilet in Seoul’s Sindang Station where a 28-year-old woman had died at the hands of her stalker. South Koreans were outraged that the police, the judiciary and her employer Seoul Metro had failed to protect her. Photo: AFP