KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

Abstract

 

Countermeasures to Eradicate Sexual Harassment and Violence: Research on Performance Evaluation and Improvement Tasks

 

Mihye Chang

Chiseon Song

Gyeonghui Yu

Inseon Lee

Jiyoun Jeong

 

In order to promote countermeasures to eradicate sexual harassment and sexual violence without fail and to strengthen cooperation among ministries, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family conducted efforts such as installing a government-wide inspection team to promote the eradication of sexual harassment and sexual violence; simultaneously promoting checks on the progress of nationwide measures to eradicate sexual harassment and sexual violence and preparing security measures; operating a special reporting center; conducting a special inspection regarding agencies where incidents had occurred; and cooperating with related governmental agencies and organizations.

 

These kinds of countermeasures were announced jointly by governmental agencies, and over 2 years, implementation of each countermeasure’s inspection process was conducted on a very large scale.

 

This study compiled data from 2018 and onward from the pan-government promotion inspection group’s government agency policy reports on comprehensive measures to prevent sexual harassment and sexual violence. After organizing the contents of policies into 6 areas, we evaluated the performance of each policy at a quantitative level in each of 6 major areas. Through this research, which was promoted jointly by all ministries for 2 years after the 2018 Me Too movement, we organized and identified the contents of 199 countermeasures to reduce sexual harassment and sexual violence, which were scattered throughout press releases and individual government agencies’ pending policy issues. While simultaneously evaluating the performance of the policies that were used during this time, we recommended a direction and points for improvement for future policies on sexual harassment and sexual violence.

 

The research method was to organize the countermeasures of each government agency, which were scattered throughout press releases and in current status data, into a chronological time sequence of sexual harassment and sexual violence incidents that occurred before the countermeasure, and each policy was classified by its area and its target when it was implemented. In addition, the limitations of the policies and future directions were presented following an expert advisory meeting.

 

Limitations were discovered on several points as follows: The countermeasures that were established were focused on countermeasures of the relevant agencies to eradicate sexual harassment and sexual violence, and an overall direction cannot be found because the policies were prepared in a mechanically combined way, rather than mediating the policies of each agency. In particular, it can be pointed out that while it is meaningful that the government is responding enthusiastically, it is regrettable that it is difficult to pinpoint what has greatly changed because most of the policies were implemented as responses to current issues at the time an incident occurred, and these countermeasures were limited to the agency or organization where the incident happened. Therefore, an excessive number of 199 countermeasures was announced, and related policy tasks were not presented from a more comprehensive perspective.

 

Although countermeasures against sexual harassment and sexual violence have been intensively announced, there are still many occurrences of violence against women, which is a blind spot in countermeasures. Legal restrictions should be made related to violence occurring between people who live together or who are seeing each other, intimate partner violence, stalking, violence against dates or lovers, etc. Overall, in a short period of time, there has been a large number of countermeasures made by cooperation between ministries, and it can be highly evaluated that there is a visible will to make policy to eradicate violence against women. However, it is difficult to set a mid- to long-term direction about what is needed to reduce violence against women overall, since when evaluating a team’s work using visible performance indicators, these are involved in the given task, regardless of the effect of the actual policy. In particular, due to the nature of agencies that have a limited term of appointment for department heads, there are many instances of inadequacy when it comes to continuously pursuing long-term goals. In foreign countries, violence reduction policies are often established as medium- and long-term tasks of at least 10 to 20 years. The most important thing is to present a policy vision that can be sustained beyond a term of appointment. In order to obtain practical outcomes from policy, more important than developing and implementing a list of policies for each agency is the necessity of establishing a mid- to long-term plan and performance evaluation that will gradually reduce sexual harassment and sexual violence against women by establishing objectives in a plan. For this, it is necessary to consider the following points.

 

First, set integrated goals and a direction that can encompass individual policies; second, make promotion systems and maintenance tasks using an integrated approach; third, devise collaborative projects with each government agency and prepare ways to ensure linkage; fourth, enact/revise related ordinances; fifth, restructure existing projects responding to gender violence; sixth, reflect the characteristics of gender violence in diverse groups; and last, develop policy assessment indicators from an integrated viewpoint.

 

Research areas: gender viololence, prevention, Performance Evaluation and Improvement of violence education

Keyword: sexual harassment, sexual violence, violence prevention education, secondary victimization, victim protection