Korean and Romanian women: victims of foreign and native violence

Abstract

War and political rebellions turn people into beasts, and while men bring about most of these dreadful events, it is women and children who have to suffer their consequences. The aim of my paper is to bring to light the common fate of women in two spatially distant and culturally different societies (Korean and Romanian), showing that in the past century they were victims of both foreign and native violence. During WWII, Japanese soldiers have sexually exploited Korean women, whereas their Romanian sisters fell prey to the Russian soldiers withdrawing from war. Later on, during the communist regime in Romania and in the aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising in Korea in 1980, the Romanian and Korean women became the victims of their own compatriots. To illustrate this sad fate, I have employed fragments excerpted from various Romanian and Korean novels, as well as secondary data. The framework I made use of is the social theory according to which “agency /action and social structure are recognized as major dimensions of social reality” (Sibeon 2004, 117) and are in strong connection with power and interests. This theory claims that it is humans in the world that do things, but very often these things are performed by individual actors that have power or are empowered by institutions. Irrespective of whether the men who were the agents/actors of women’s abuse had physical or political power over their victims, what happened to the Romanian and Korean women (and most probably to women in other parts of the world) is unpardonable.