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223 CEDAW and Viol ence against Women: Pr oviding the “Missing Link” H eisoo Shin, Republic of Korea I first heard about the CEDAW Convention in 1988 while I was studying as a Ph.D. student at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in the United States. Though I remember no substantial discussion about CEDAW, Charlotte Bunch taught a course called “Women, Violence and Human Rights,” which I took with about thirty other women—graduate students, women’s studies teachers, and activists. We studied various forms of violence experienced by women, the power structure as the root cause, and various means to protect women’s rights. This course, together with my involvement in the establishment of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University, may have been why I began working directly on issues of violence against women soon after returning to South Korea and again later as a member of the CEDAW Committee. South Korean Women’s Movements against Gender Violence Before I left Korea in 1982 to study in the United States, I had already worked for seven years in two women’s organizations. My work at the Korean League of Women Voters and Korea Church Women United from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s related mostly to basic consciousness-raising activities for women in the context of patriarchal Korean society. Violence against women, whether wife battery, rape, or in any other form, remained hidden and invisible as a social issue.This was a time of dictatorship: Emergency decrees were issued frequently, and violence was rampant, especially by the military and the police.1 As the whole state was under the control of the military, “democracy” or “freedom” became the most urgent issue for people involved in civic and social movements. Rape and domestic violence were not recognized as issues related to the “right to freedom” or the “right to life or personal security.” Instead, an old saying that “a woman needs to be beaten every three days” in order to be “softened” and made amenable was commonplace throughout Korean society at the time. When I went back to Korea in the summer of 1991 with a doctorate in sociology, Korea Women’s Hot Line asked me to help them. The Hot Line, established in 1983, played a pioneering role in challenging the deep-rooted Korean patriarchy by raising the issue of wife battery. After several months of involvement, I became one of the three vice-presidents of the Hot Line and was in charge of the national movement for legislation on gender violence. Because of the urgent need for legislation, the Korea Women’s Associations United, with which the Hot Line was affiliated , formed a Special Committee for Legislation. We worked for several months on a draft bill on sexual violence. It is worth noting that, until the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in 1995, few within the Korean women’s movements knew of the CEDAW Convention and its General Recommendation No. 19 on violence against women. Korea had ratified the Convention rather early in 1984 under the military dictatorship government; it probably did so to improve its image internationally. But nobody in the country was aware of the ratification, except a handful of legislators who had participated in a discussion of the Convention in the National Assembly. The Korean Government’s initial report and second periodic report were submitted and examined by the Committee in 1991 and 1993 respectively, but without the knowledge of Korean women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or feminist scholars. It was not until 1998, when the third and the fourth periodic reports were examined together, that the first NGO report was submitted to the Committee. From the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, Korean society had witnessed an eruption of nation-shocking court cases of violence against women. I want to offer only a few examples here. In 1991, a thirty-yearold woman, raped at the age of nine, killed the rapist after twenty-one years of suffering from the trauma. Another case involved a university student who had been repeatedly raped for thirteen years, from age nine, by her stepfather, which only ended when she and her boyfriend killed the man. Her mother was also a victim of this man’s violence. In 1993, a female research assistant of Seoul National University brought a civil lawsuit against her professor, which was recorded as the first sexual harassment case. There was also a case of domestic violence...

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