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There were many Korean articles about Sonny’s umbrella ‘controversy’ originally engineered by a Korean feminist X user. The original post has gained several millions of views. I’m not sure if any bots were involved. Now there is this NYT article written by a Korean American. [New York Times] Should This Soccer Star Have Held an Umbrella for a Female Interviewer? Although blatant haters were mocked even by some Korean female social media users in the end due to how absurd and forced the whole non-issue was, it seems the journalist had to fill out a mandatory narrative template to satisfy the media’s political bias. I noticed that the journalist pulled some dubious stats. The purpose of this post is to analyze them because this is not the first time I’ve seen such claims. He made the following statement in his article.
Let’s take a look at the very sources the journalist cited. On the FBI website he linked, ‘Violent Offenses’ are Aggravated Assault, Homicide, Rape and Robbery. This must be the basis for his ‘roughly half’ claim. Victims of ‘Violent Offenses’ in the US (excluding unidentified victims) What are considered ‘violent crimes’ in Korea? He linked this KOSIS database webpage. You will immediately notice that crime categorization in Korean stats seems very different from FBI stats. There are 강력범죄 and 폭력범죄 categories. 강력범죄 is often translated as ‘violent crimes’, but then it can be confused with 폭력범죄 which is always translated as ‘violent crimes’. Let’s call 강력범죄 ‘heinous crimes’ here. They include Homicide (including attempted homicide), Robbery, Rape, Imitative Rape (유사강간), Indecent Acts by Compulsion (강제추행) and Arson. I am trying to use the official crime names in English here. Victims of ‘Heinous Crimes’ (강력범죄) in Korea, 2022 Note that ‘Indecent Acts by Compulsion’ is included and anything equivalent to ‘Aggravated Assault’ is missing in this category. This is the category the journalist might have used. In other words, a major physical violence type that victimizes a lot more men is missing and broader sexual crimes that mostly target women are included. They are all serious crimes, but the point is that categorization is too different for an apple-to-apple comparison. As shown in the table below, there are a lot more male victims of ‘Violent Crimes’ in Korea, especially those that include direct physical violence. Victims of ‘Violent Crimes’ (폭력범죄) in Korea, 2022 If you remove ‘Indecent Acts by Compulsion’, add ‘Inflicting Bodily Injury on Other’ in the first Korean crime table and merge some crime types, it will look like this. Victims of certain crimes in the US (5 years) and Korea (2022) You can’t still claim these rough tables are a fair comparison because different countries may use different crime definitions and their legal and law enforcement environments may be different. It has to be one overseeing body applying exactly the same standards, which rarely happens cross-nationally. What I would like to see is more data integrity from the activists. They have messed up numbers many times intentionally or not. They seem too fixated on ringing the loudest alarm bell and painting Korea as exceptionally troubled at every chance. Powerful media platforms help spread it and I keep seeing foreigners making strange claims about Korea based on that. Please check the data to see if there is anything missing or incorrect. Thanks. submitted by /u/pomirobotics |
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