Self-Defense and Coping Skills for Those Living in the Countryside

“Training to Improve Responses to Gender-based Violence in Rural Jeju” Series ①

By Eun-young

Published May 21, 2025

Translated by Marilyn Hook

“I live in this town, and these other people live around here too! We hope you enjoy our performance! I’ll start things off. One, two, three! Elders-”

“Be well!”

My friends and I started shouting and beating drums with all our might. The 80-or-so senior citizens who filled the senior center clapped their hands to our rhythm. It was our small town’s Senior Citizens’ Party, held on Parents’ Day. At the request of the head of the town, I performed Batucada (a type of Brazilian percussion music) with a few young female friends. The sky was clear and expansive, everyone had pretty red carnation brooches, and I was energized by the atmosphere of the elderly audience treating us akkopgeh (a word in the Jeju dialect meaning ‘with love and as something precious’), looking at us as if we were their grandchildren.

Immediately after the performance, we put on our Saemaul [New Village] Movement vests and went to help with the meal for the party. The local volunteers and women's association members had taken charge of the senior center’s kitchen, so we were put to work serving. After carrying hundreds of plates, we went outside and had lunch together. What a dazzling day, I thought. Yes, it's a day like the ending of the Japanese movie Little Forest 2.

 

The Jeju Women’s Association is holding “Trainings to Improve Daily Coping Skills” in regards to gender-based violence in 2025. Here, participants at a session are sharing their experiences of gendered violence in rural life. (Photo credit: Jeju Women’s Association 2030 Committee)

For young women, neighborhood events are often a battle as well as a party

 

It has been 11 years since I pulled up my roots in Seoul with my own hands and moved to Jeju. At this point, I can say that I have successfully escaped from the mainland. And I have spent eight of those years in the countryside—that is, in an eupmyeon [township, as opposed to city] area. I came to this town last year, and I liked it so much that I am actively expanding my network. This is for survival.

“In rural areas, there are many unexpected living expenses, such as heating costs, transportation costs, and consumer goods that are more expensive than in the city. In such cases, if you have no social network within the region, you have to depend on specific people or pay high costs for the information and services you need. Therefore, building social connections is important for basic material support in the early stages of migration.”

The above was pointed out in the 2019 ‘Regional Tailored Youth Migration Support Program’ survey report issued by the Gurye Daum Research Association. As someone who has experienced it, this is absolutely true! Even if you move to the countryside because you are struggling with the competitiveness of society and your interpersonal relationships, your social network is still important—really, it becomes even more important.

Additionally, if you are someone like me who absolutely hates regretting your decisions, you may find yourself engaging in an invisible struggle against patriarchy because you want to reterritorialize your space.

In that sense, the party for the elderly people was both a festival that expanded my network of relationships and a site for invisible struggle. In fact, not all the scenes of the day described above were beautiful.

Amidst objectification as young women – “agassi [young lady]” - and friendly(?) attempts to set us up with young men, the iffy compliments(?) that we should serve them because we were pretty girls, and the clear wariness and curiosity toward newcomers on display in the 50 times we were asked, 'Where on earth are you from?'  we were continuously put in situations where we had to serve people neatly and tactfully in this unfamiliar space.

But I was not alone, I was more of a guest than a host, I had a lot of interpersonal experience, and I understood why Jeju’s elders are wary of newcomers. I had also been consistently ‘training to improve daily coping skills’ with another attendee at the party since February. So I was able to deal with the various situations that arose that day, and I will remember it as a fun and exciting event.

More women are moving to countryside alone, and they need support

But can rural life be a festival for everyone? Could I, too, feel like that every day? There is zero possibility of this. The genre of the movie Little Forest is rural fantasy.

In a survey of 114 rural women conducted by the provincial feminist group Culture Planning Month in June 2018, 89.5% agreed with the statement “rural sexual culture is unequal,” largely citing “discriminatory gender role division” (31.6%) as the cause. When asked “Have you ever experienced sexual harassment, sexual assault, or other sexual violence?”, the majority, 65.5%, answered that they had.

This research didn’t take place in Jeju, but the situation is so similar. In all types of private situations, I often end up doing a kind of tai chi to avoid unwanted touching. I think of a story from a friend in the west of Jeju who said that when she went to help out at a community event, she was classified as a ‘kitchen woman’ and trapped there boiling noodles throughout the whole event. I also think of a friend who completed classes at a haenyeo training school and managed to claw her way into the fishing industry by catching dozens of kilos of sea urchins, but who ended up leaving Jeju last year due to gender-based violence in the industry and worsening conflicts within the haenyeo community. Before she left, my friend told the others, “You shouldn’t accept people [into the school] if you’re just going to treat them like this.”

A poster made by the Jeju Women’s Association’s 2030 Committee for its “Training to Improve Daily Coping Skills.”

 

Although this culture is not improving at all, the number of women taking up farming and/or moving to rural areas is steadily increasing.

According to K-Farm News, the number of women choosing to take up farming and/or move to rural areas increased from 200,000 in 2013 to 240,000 in 2021. In 2021, 46.4% of all new farmers/ rural residents were women, and more than half of them were young or middle-aged. Recent new female farmers and rural residents are setting up mainly single-person households, and the proportion of women who are moving with a companion is decreasing.

K-Farm News concluded that the trend toward a female-led gwinong [return to farming]/ gwichon [return to rural areas] is deepening. I also continue to encounter women who have finally packed their bags and come to Jeju after wanting to settle here for years.

 

As someone who is working to support young people settling here, I began to think, “Then how can a woman live alone in the countryside? What kind of safety net does she need?” Even I, a person who is not very concerned about what others think and lives according to her own standards, do not always stand up and respond ideally to every situation, so I thought that people who have just moved and are unfamiliar with a place would have a harder time. If they mustered up the courage to uproot themselves and move, but cannot settle into their new place because they keep being hurt there, their roots will weaken and they may wander around. I wanted to create a safety net to the extent that I could.

Then I met Shin-yul, a feminist self-defense training instructor. She is a young woman who moved to rural Jeju three years ago and was working as an instructor at the Jeju Women’s Association’s Gender Equality Education Center. She gave a “Living Book” lecture about her story of starting self-defense training, and I happened to hear it. After the lecture, she even gave a two-hour mini workshop, and I felt relieved and overwhelmed with joy at this fortuitous encounter.

She has been working for years on a variety of ways to deal with physical and verbal boundary violations. She completed a feminist self-defense training course in the US a few years ago and is now on her own path, one that draws from psychology, coaching, and self-defense.

The project to improve our ability to deal with everyday gender-based violence

 

Shin-yul and I were both active members of the Jeju Women's Association, and the Jeju Women's Association had also been increasingly concerned about gender equality in rural areas while working on a project related to that issue for the past five years, so we all came together to work on this project.

 

A rural feminism project! We came to these conclusions: there are many grey areas in rural life; it’s often not clear what is your space and what is mine; we have to live in these grey areas with the older generation whose boundaries regarding bodies and relationships are as different from ours as the times they lived through; let’s improve our abilities to deal with everyday gender-based violence in rural areas; and that is also the way for rural women to take charge of their lives!

 

The fact that we were selected for a Korea Foundation for Women support project to address gender-based violence,  and thereby gained resources, was also a great driving force. The Korea Women's Foundation is funding activities to combat various forms of gender-based violence in order to expand the scope of what society recognizes as gender-based violence.

Gender-based violence is any type of harm inflicted on an individual or group because of their gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Because it stems from a power imbalance, it can be sexual, physical, verbal, psychological/emotional, or socioeconomic violence.

A session on understanding gender-based violence at the Training to Improve Daily Coping Skills course held in February and March. (Photo credit: Jeju Women’s Association’s 2030 Committee)

We refined our plans to meet the requirements of the support project. The main points of our project were as follows: 1) Describe the various forms of gender-based violence occurring in rural areas; 2) Run a pilot program to respond to these situations; 3) Develop a manual to be distributed to approximately 70 gender-equality stakeholders nationwide.

Meeting rural women who had been invisible and hearing about their experiences

Since then it has been just a matter of finding participants. Starting from February, we have conducted eight-week training courses in two small towns and also held one-week intensive trainings for certain groups. In all, we have met 22 women.

 

The main participants have been people rearing children who moved to Jeju so that those children could run around and play, young people who relocated here recently, middle-aged natives who have a clear feminist identity but have been living quietly in the region, people who may not have a feminist identity but have a desire to strengthen their daily coping skills, and young women from high-risk remote areas. Only one person was already participating in organizations such as women’s associations and village steering committees. I was secretly happy that people who had not been seen in local community women’s activities were really coming out to join us.

 

In the first week, we share our experiences of gender-based violence, and from the second week, we focus on respect for boundaries and self-defense training. In the last week, we role-play dealing with difficult situations. The participants build intimacy and trust among themselves, and they even give coping advice to each other.

After all the sessions are completed, we have the participants fill out a feedback survey, and they have said that the best parts are meeting every week to share how they have responded to recent experiences and the training to reinforce their boundaries. I am a member of the planning team and assistant instructor for this project, but as an individual, I also like those times the most.

Training to Improve Daily Coping Skills participants learn how to approach each other with a delicate sense of their own boundaries. (Photo credit: Jeju Women’s Association’s 2030 Committee)

We have sometimes learned of contexts that were different from those targeted by our project, such as young women having difficulty standing up for themselves in minor conflicts or incidents in daily life that could not be considered gender violence, and who blame themselves for this or avoid such situations. Watching them take great care to use (unnecessary) cushion words and take responsibility for others’ emotions, it seems like a reflection of our anxious society, and it makes me sad. Their difficulties are also areas to tackle and potential activities for future projects, so I have decided to look into it more after this project ends.

 

The dream of making a gender-equal countryside by widening the spectrum of responses

 

This project, which aims to expand the spectrum of responses available in everyday situations for its participants, is still ongoing. Long-term trainings in two towns will conclude in mid-July, and training is also being conducted in Jeju City because of pestering(?) from the women there. We are using materials previously published by the Korea Sexual Violence Counseling Center and Chungbuk Women's Foundation and overseas sources for reference as we write the manual on our training methods, but it is still very difficult. We are worried about whether we can produce materials useful enough to enable local gender equality stakeholders to hold real trainings.

 

I hope that our clumsy efforts in Jeju will have a positive impact on realizing gender equality in every corner of the country. I hope that our sincerity, which we are sending out in the manual, will eventually reach those of you who want to live in the countryside, and that you too, in your own way, will enjoy rural living that feels like a movie or a festival.

 

About the Author: Eunyoung is the chair of the Jeju Women's Association’s 2030 Committee. A Jeju-lover living the dream, she’s up for doing anything fun and well-intentioned on Jeju. She is a member of the Jeju Women's Association Policy Committee. She created the only(?!) female Batucada group in Korea, Blocku Japari, and lives a happy life behind the drums. She founded and continues to operate Sinsulmok School, a program that lets young adults experience life on Jeju, in Seogwipo.

 

*Original article: https://www.ildaro.com/10186