Mia Lee - Week One Card News
According to Journalist Ye-seul Hyun of Joong-Ang Ilbo, a male student aged 17 residing in Gwangju, South Korea, ended his life on June 29, 2021 due to the brutality of school violence.
This adolescent was approximately 180cm tall and 90kg heavy, yet such physical traits could not prevent the cruel school violence that took his life.
According to the article, the perpetrator abused the victim’s cordial and gentle personality to commit violence disguised as jokes. They not only forcefully commanded him to obey their every order, but also habitually assaulted his face, shoulders, and thighs. They then proceeded to use the fact that victim often laughed it off as an excuse to avoid all responsibility for the violence. The court sent three out of the five perpetrators to the juvenile detention center for a stunningly short time of three years.
Surprisingly, the Korean government announced that there have been zero cases of suicide due to school violence from 2016 to 2020. Such mistaken statistics display how the Ministry of Education is ignoring the struggles of youth without a proper analysis or understanding of the causes behind suicide. Although reality displays a growing number of adolescents ending their lives as a result of gang violence or continuous physical and psychological bullying, most of such cases were classified as unknown because the school did not properly identify the cause of the suicide.
As a member of society, we must materialize and practice school violence prevention methods for generations to come. To realize this, we must remember that our first task is to understand the accurate reality of school violence.
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