|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 02/04
Foreign Policy
Cheating Chatter
Soyoung Ho*
South Korea, the world's leader in high-speed Internet connectivity, is suffering from the high-speed onset of technology-related social ills. The proclivity of housewives to "chat" in cyberspace is facilitating the growth of extramarital online relationships, hookups that are, in turn, wreaking havoc upon Korean marriages and family life. In the last decade, Korea's divorce rate has more than doubled to 47 percent (the United States' is 54 percent).
About 50 percent of the 35 million Koreans aged 13 to 55 in the country of 48 million claim to be a member of at least one of 10,000 chat sites, such as www.daum.net and www.freechal.com. According to the Korea Cyber Addiction Prevention Center, 90 percent of the housewives that chat do so without their spouses' knowledge. Forty-five percent of these housewives told pollsters in a survey that they meet in person the men with whom they chat. In December 2001, a Korean government survey of chatters with troubled marriages found that in more than 44 percent of cases, chatting led to illicit sexual affairs.
The trend underscores how the relative openness of cyberspace can break down rigid husband-wife relationships in a patriarchal society. Most women in Korea are stay-at-home moms, and chat rooms offer an illusion of a better life. Jawan Koo, a 37-year-old mother of two, says housewives chat because "they are bored to tears with nothing to do after sending off their husbands to work and children to school. And it's fun, anonymous."
Most Koreans agree that traditional social and familial structures are behind the trend, since these strictures increase the allure of cyberspace. For now, the Korean government seems to agree. It is working on ways to warn schoolchildren of cyberspace's social ills, rather than taking new legislative action to curb the phenomenon. Su-Jin Lee, an official at the Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion (www.kado.or.kr), says that warning children is useless if "preventive education is not taken on a continual basis." That may be. But as women continue to break down traditional familial barriers, their attempts at finding online extramarital identities may also naturally decrease as their happiness increases.
Notes
Note *: Soyoung Ho is an editorial assistant at the Washington Monthly. Back