One of the people who were taken was made to drink urine.
With just the first half of the show, Song Hye Kyo's latest hit, "The Glory," has taken the world by storm.
The story is about a kid who gets hurt at school and grows up to get revenge.
The Glory shows the violence of school bullying in South Korea in a much more graphic way than most K-dramas.
Some viewers didn't know if it was real or if it was exaggerated. But a school commissioner says that it is usually worse.
Choi Woo Sung was recently a guest on News High Kick on MBC Radio. Choi is a school commissioner at the Gyeonggi Suwon Office of Education.
He is in charge of cases involving violence at school. On the show, he was asked if the scene where Moon Dong Eun's bullies beat her with a hot curling iron is real. Choi said back, "The truth is worse."
Before, the same scene caused a big stir in South Korean online forums when people remembered that it might have been based on a real case of bullying.
But Choi gave an example that was very similar to the violence in The Glory. In 2006, it was said that a group of middle school students in Cheongju beat up another student for 20 days straight.
Kim, who was 15 at the time, was in charge of the group, which beat victim "A" with a baseball bat, burned her arm with a hair iron in the classroom, and scratched her chest with a clothespin.
"At that time, the victim had serious burns and a tailbone that stuck out. She had to stay in the hospital for 5 to 6 weeks… The people who did it also said that they punished the victim by using their fingernails to pull off the scabs that had formed on her scars." —MBC Radio's Choi Woo Song
Choi brought up a number of other cases of violence by minors. In the Yangsan Girls' Middle School Assault Case, which happened in 2021, a group of middle school girls beat up a foreign student.
The people who did it had recorded it and put it on internet forums.
In the Cheonghak-dong Dormitory Cruelty Case (2020), a group of girls forced the victim to drink her own urine after putting foreign objects inside her.
The North Gyeonggi Snow Bed Sexual Assault Case (2022) is the most recent case like this that shocked the whole country. A 9-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by a 12-year-old boy who had made a bed out of snow.
Then, Commissioner Choi said that he was very sad that most of the criminals were under 14 years old, which meant that the law could protect them.
Most of the time, people who cause violence at school get legal protection because they are "juvenile delinquents."
This term is used to talk about children between the ages of 10 and 14 who have broken the law but are still protected. Instead of jail time or community service, they get a light sentence like juvenile detention or community service.
"In all three cases, some or all of the bad guys were under 14 years old, so there was only so much that could be done to punish them…I agree that the age limits should be lowered gradually because criminals are getting younger and their crimes are getting more complicated and violent.At the same time, as a society, we need to make sure that these kinds of things don't happen in the first place."—MBC Radio's Choi Woo Song
In December of last year, the South Korean government passed a bill that changed the Juvenile Justice, And Delinquency Prevention Act to lower the age limit from 14 to 13.
Source(1)
