Recently a shocking incident occurred. A middle-school girl killed herself because she could not endure being bullied anymore. This news has made us aware that bullying in schools is just as serious as in the army. Bullying also occurs with a very high frequency in the workplace. Many forms of bullying exist in our society.
Pang-shuttle is a newly-coined word originating from school bullying. Pang means bread and shuttle has its origin in a game character that takes charge of transport. Pang-shuttle is the action used to coerce a student into to going and buying bread for the more powerful students at a junior high school, the so-called il jin. There are other types of shuttle, for examples, martial-arts shuttle that means fighting among shuttles, wi-fi shuttle that means making free internet zones using smartphones and so on. In adult society, this happens as well. The survey conducted by Saramin, a jobsite shows that 62 percent of workers have experienced a sense of alienation. They feel the greatest sense of alienation when they do not know how to work. Last year a new conscript wanted to receive hospital treatment, but his demands were ignored. In the end he committed suicide.
What is bullying and why does it happen? Bullying is a form of aggressive behavior under the use of force to affect others, it is habitual and involves an imbalance of power. According to medical information, bullying is translated literally as isolation from a group. It is presupposed that bullying has the power of group consciousness. Taking a broad view of this problem, Wee Gyoeng-hae (Lecturer, Dept. of Sociology) said, “The main reason why bullying occurs is because the social system focuses only on college entrance exams while the ideals of education disappear in Korean society. Also individual value is not respected in today’s society and the ideals of education are only standardized. Bullying is a distorted way of selection and it is a counter product of the vague pursuit of only being a winner.”
Then, how is the situation in Chonnam National University (CNU)? CNU founded the Student-life Counseling Center (SCC) that helps students to adjust themselves to school life and to develop holistic practices in June 2011. According to the counseling results of the SCC, the majority of counseling cases are about personality problems, with 23.12 percent. Often there are examples of counseling for victims of verbal abuse, however, frequently verbal abuse is not taken seriously. Also if there is violence or bullying on campus, it is hardly connected to the SCC in reality.
Some counselees say that they want to overcome trauma they have experienced before they entered university. Although the SCC operates programs for the students to overcome these problems through various methods such as healing camps, it is not efficient to solve all of the fundamental problems with only limited programs. It is required to develop more programs and to pay more attention to the students in need.
Even though school, army violence and mobbing seemed to be divided by their different places, they are not completely separate problems. However, bullying needs different approaches: a microscopic way for the university system and a macroscopic way for the basic social group system to transform. When we compare the social group-system and the school system, the school system is relatively closer to us. So, it needs to be changed first and it will have an impact that makes the social system change too. It is certain that we cannot change our society without toil.
By Kim So-jeong, Tribune Reporter
[Cover Story]
김소정 기자
ksjbird@naver.com