<#320 Faculty Column>
Live Together in the Multicultural Age
By Kuk Min-ho, Professor, Department of Sociology
On May 2011, a man living in the rural area brutally murdered his Vietnamese wife who delivered a baby 19 days earlier. It was a real shock to Korean society. How can such a brutal murder happen in the normally peaceful countryside? It led us to reconsider the multicultural family system in Korea and the relationship of the victim to the murderer and their nationality.
The rapid increase of immigration to Korea has stressed Korean society to embrace ethnic and cultural diversity. The number of marriages between foreigners and Koreans has been increasing in recent years. From 2008 to 2011, the number of foreigners married to Koreans increased by almost 50 percent to 211,458 and the number of children from multicultural backgrounds aged 6 to 18 has more than tripled to 151,154. International marriages now make up 13 percent of all marriage in Korea. The country was changing to become a truly multicultural society and Koreans were educated to welcome foreigners and outside cultures. The phenomenon of the rising number of multicultural families in Korea has pushed the Korean government to enact laws to protect their rights, establish migrant centers, and to provide cultural education to them to better understand how Korean society works. Korean society is now becoming increasingly diverse and multicultural.
On the other hand, as the number of multicultural families has increased, the levels of problems have also gone up. Despite multicultural families being on a steep rise in Korean society, the perception that Koreans hold towards them has not changed much yet. Korea is still largely a homogeneous country and exhibits prejudice and discrimination against foreigners and mixed-raced children. Experts say that Korea's sense of racial and cultural homogeneity is the main cause of their bias against people with different appearances.
Discrimination is still a problem of foreign wives and their mixed-race children as Koreans have not accepted them as part of their society. They do not accept them as “real Koreans”. Many Koreans regard foreign spouses and their children as lower in social status. Multicultural families in Korea are second-class citizens since they are not pure Korean in blood. Korean men do not treat their foreign wives as equal. Many of them believe that their wives marry Koreans only for money. It may take a long time to create mutual trust.
Foreign brides who have married Korean men and made Korea their second home have shared the problems that the women encountered while living in Korea, including racial and cultural discrimination, domestic violence, poverty, illegal international matchmaking, suicide, and the insufficient preparation of the government to solve the multitude of problems. Many of the children of multicultural families are targets of discrimination and prejudice. Children from multicultural families are taunted by classmates, and ridiculed for their appearances. They have dropped out from school because of their classmates and have even had their teachers ignore them. They are treated differently by their teachers and other people in the community.
The government must come up with solid measures to protect the women and their children against discrimination and mistreatment. More opportunities should be given to migrants and Koreans to socialize with each other. Koreans should shake off their stereotypes to achieve harmony, and start to hold in high esteem migrant women's culture, diversity and human rights. The most important thing is education. Currently there is no education to teach these children about different cultures, that there are many races and cultures in the world. We should change our mind and attitude through education to embrace multicultural families as Koreans. They are not different. All are equal as human beings. We have to truly open up to other races and cultures to live together in the multicultural age.
국민호 사회학과 교수
tribune@cnumedia.com