Yes, this is a big deal (1): Beyond the Fossilized family
By Kim-Hong Miri
Published: May 14, 2016
Translated by Jamie Sung
※Family is a symbol of love and comfort, but 53.8% of Korean families are abusive. Even so, domestic violence is widely considered ‘someone else’s business’ or ‘family matters that should not be meddled with.’ We at Ilda would like to explore the fundamental solutions to domestic violence. The ‘Yes, this is a big deal’ series will run as part of the ‘May, Month of Peace Free of Domestic Violence’ campaign by Korea Women’s Hot Line. The writer of this article, Kim-Hong Miri, is a member of Korea Women’s Hot Line (http://hotline.or.kr/eng/).
Terrible things that happen in the name of family
On April 5, 2016, I read an article about a woman who gave birth to a child, whom she then killed. It turned out she had been repeatedly raped by her brother-in-law since she was 19 years old, and the child was conceived due to rape. She had not sought help because she felt that reporting what her brother-in-law did to her would betray the best interests of her sick sister, niece and nephews, whom she had to look after. Now, what then would family mean to this woman, who is someone’s sister, aunt, sister-in-law and mother?
I also read an article about a man who coerced his wife into meeting him during their separation period and battered her after locking her up in his basement storage (March 28, 2015). The bait he used was the child visitation rights. Children are the number one weapon husbands love to use against wives trying to escape from domestic violence. Laws painstakingly safeguard the rights of men, who are seen as fathers before they are seen as perpetrators of domestic violence. Domestic violence is not given much consideration in the face of the law’s stubborn eagerness “to preserve the family.” Thanks to this potent obsession with preserving family, there is never a shortage of women murdered by their husbands during divorce proceedings.
In December 2015, a man was able to lure and murder both his wife and child by using the excuse of visitation rights. With these dying victims in mind, one question begs to be asked: what really is this “family” that laws try so hard to preserve? And what would “family” mean to this man who would rather die with or kill than to lose them?
This past March, a man murdered his wife and daughter, and then killed himself. Last October, a 50-year-old man murdered his wife, who was battling the last stage of cancer, and his daughter, who was attending a specialized high school for gifted students. Tragedies like these have never stopped happening. The story of a man [of Korean descent] who shot his wife and two children in LA 10 years ago because of financial strife, and the daughter who survived this attack, was brought back to us by an LA Times article this past April. What would ‘family’ mean to the surviving daughter?
What does family mean to you?
We often neglect to mention whose family we are discussing when we define family, as if we assume family is the same for everyone or believe that it should be. However, family is also a concrete space in which powers are at play. Because of this, the meaning of family significantly differs, depending on the position of each person. This is why it’s important to ask whose family we are trying to define.
As we neglect to ask ‘whose family,’ eliminate the context of life, discuss family and emphasize its value, family becomes increasingly taxidermied. Innumerable people seek space to rest in and depend on; some may say that space is ‘family’ without a question. Nevertheless, in a society that provides countless rules to answer the question of ‘how to live and with whom,’ ‘family’ gives comfort only to certain groups of people who meet certain conditions.
Comfort may find its way to the man raping his sister-in-law who cannot fight him, or the man regularly beating his wife who chose to endure rather than resist violence. Yet, for the sister-in-law and the wife who persevered to take responsibility for their ‘family’ by the means of foregoing themselves and giving up all resistance, family can never be said to be a place of comfort.
You want to ‘protect your family’ from homosexuality and Islam?
During Korea’s 20th National Assembly election campaign this past April, the Christian Liberty Party featured Actress Seo Junghee in its promotional leaflets. Seo has said that she was coerced into marrying her ex-husband, TV personality Seo Sewon, in 1983 after he more or less raped her. For the 30 years since then, she has lived the life of a domestic violence victim, yet she still claimed the anti-adultery law* should be resurrected ‘to protect the family’ and that ‘we must protect our family from homosexuality and Islam.’
Bringing back the anti-adultery law can in no way stop men from committing adultery, battery and rape. Hatred against sexual minorities and Muslims could only grow into hatred against all social minorities, which would eventually contribute to enforcing violence against women (a ‘minority’ who takes up half the world’s population). Therefore, bringing back the anti-adultery law and “banning” homosexuality and Islam cannot lead to the creation of an equal and peaceful family culture.
Nonetheless, the Christian Liberty Party and Seo are justifying all bigotry and hatred with a single trite sentence - ‘Let’s protect our family’ - for some reason. They proclaim loudly that eliminating homosexuality would prevent the destruction of the family, eliminating Islam is for the good of the family and that bringing back the anti-adultery law would help protect the family – a typical example of conveniently utilizing the deeply rooted ‘familism’ of Korean society for the wrong cause.
Examples of unjust use of ‘taxidermied family’
Sometimes I think Koreans hide their head in the sand and use the word ‘family’ as the answer to everything. To struggling youth, they give hollow sympathy and labels like ‘sampo generation’ (for those who have given up on romantic relationships, marriage, and children), opo generation (those who have given up on the above plus home ownership and all other human relationships), and ‘yukmu generation’ (those who lack a job, income, home, romantic relationship, children, and future). Korean government takes it upon itself to arrange international marriages for single rural men who feel they must “import” foreign girls from developing nations in order to get hitched, in a system akin to human trafficking. Laws enacted by provincial and city governments provide financial support for these mail-order bride programs under the title of ‘International Marriage Sponsorship Statutes.’ The press pinpoints Korea’s low birth rate (and used to pinpoint its high birth rate in the past) as the culprit of its faltering economic growth. Moreover, the so-called experts incessantly worry over how one out of six Korean men cannot marry this year because of the peaking male-to-female ratio, conveniently looking past the 370,000 victims of female infanticide (who never got a chance to even be born) that are at the root of this imbalance. All of these efforts casually take out of the equation the unfairly structured gender relations and issues caused by global capitalism and safely land at a belief that every problem stems from family or lack thereof.
Such old-fashioned belief that public and private sectors of life are clearly separated aims to picture family as existing in a vacuum, as if changes taking place within family are completely independent of social changes taking place outside the family. Problems caused by global capitalism and gender inequality are separated from the family. Instead, they are simply portrayed as matters that can easily be solved by individual efforts to remedy them and make the right choices in pregnancies, abortions and marriage. This binary system of dividing public and private sectors is the first step to perfecting a system in which efforts made by individuals in a family are solely held responsible for solving all of the headache-inducing social problems.
It is not surprising that women are singled out and criticized for the low birth rate (many lament that “women these days are selfish, self-centered, irresponsible, greedy and lazy”), when the increase in allergic diseases is being attributed to ‘decreased cleaning opportunities [for women] due to an increase in nuclear families and women in the workforce.’ At this pace, if doomsday ever comes, “unhealthy families” and greedy women who abandoned their family just so that they could join men in the outside workforce will take all the blame for it.
Oh, but ‘family’ is much more than that. Hence, this society makes frequent attempts at questioning whether you are worthy of having a family. Your sexual orientation, disabilities, age, ethnicity and religion are all used as evidence of your unworthiness to start a family and have children. Not only are lesbians’ and gay people’s right to marriage and disabled women’s right to give birth denied, the rights to form various types of family are being infringed upon in a Korean society that adamantly insists on only accepting the “normal” families. Family stands like the Berlin wall before 1989, separating“[worthy] citizens” and “[unworthy] non-citizens”, andas one’s right to have a family is constantly questioned, it simultaneously moves away from acting as a communal tie for imperfect individuals.
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| As we emphasize the importance of family without specifying whose family it is, families increasingly become taxidermied. |
Do you really think it’s okay to pretend that our family is“normal”?
As it does every year, National Family Month has fast approached. From Children’s Day (5th), Parents’ Day (8th), and International Day of Families (15th) to Spouses’ Day (21st), National Family Month aims to appreciate family at least a few days a month, one month a year. You could simply state that “family’s important” and move on. But what should really be “important” here is what such important ‘family’ consists of, and why the importance of family must be emphasized. When we repeatedly claim that “family’s important” without defining what a family is, we taxidermize ‘family’. We start to isolate ourselves from it.
As people make efforts to properly celebrate ‘family events’ by procuring popular gifts for children a month in advance of Children’s Day and making dinner reservations at the most popular restaurants that were featured on TV to take out their parents, they feel not just the importance but also the weight of their family. People experience the mundane and tiring nature and the strict order and structure of their family as well as their own feelings of ambivalence toward them. We continue on with our lives as we engrave this complex emotional circuit onto the word ‘family’.
We hide behind the slogan “Family’s important” and suppress our complicated feelings by choosing not to answer the questions it raises. Acting like a “normal family” reaches its peak in May, the National Family Month, as we urgently cover this forcedness with wrapping paper. Are we really going to be okay? Is it truly okay to just superficially act out this let’s-be-nice-to-family scenario?
I have a small wish for May, the Month of Family – I wish we could call all those we comfort and are comforted by ‘our family.’
People always rely on others. They may strive to prove they are okay on their own but unless you are from another planet, you take care of, are taken care of, comfort and are comforted by someone. I don’t know when it started, but I’m hesitant to call such people ‘family’ now. This is because I’m not sure if the term ‘family’ can regain its warmth it once had despite so much violence that has been committed in its name. Is it okay for me to expect to put such doubt to rest and hope that anyone can find comfort in the name of family someday?
* Anti-adultery law: A South Korean law that made adultery an offense punishable by up to two years in prison. It was overturned by the Constitutional Court in February 2015, on the basis of today’s changing sexual mores and increasing emphasis on individual rights.
*Original article: http://ildaro.com/sub_read.html?uid=7467
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