[Interview file]'Doosoon Cho in 2008' and'Doosoon Cho in 2020', has our society improved?

"At the word that Jo Doo-soon is coming nearby, his gaze came up 12 years ago, and his legs were relieved and he collapsed." [Cho Doo-soon victim's father]

Jo Doo-soon, a child sex offender who is due out on December 12th.

After he is released, he returns to his house in Ansan.

It is near the place where the families of the victims of the Cho Doo-soon incident had been living for 12 years while healing their wounds.

Naturally, the victims' families are anxious.

The father of the victim of Jo Doo-soon was seeing Cho Doo-soon's choice of Ansan as a kind of retaliation, so he was angry, and at the same time, it seemed that fear came.

The'gaze' referred to by the father of the victim of the Jo Doo-soon incident refers to the look that Jo Doo-soon looked at the victims' families at the time of the trial.

Shin Eui-jin, a professor at Yonsei University's psychiatry department at the victim's doctor, said that the news of the coming of the perpetrator Cho Doo-soon, who has never made a reflection or apology to the victims' families, said that the terrible incident 12 years ago would come to mind again as yesterday.

The father of the victim of the Cho Doo-soon incident, who responded to the interview with the SBS News Story team after continuing to refrain from interviewing them, burst into anguish, asking what he was doing for 12 years and then taking measures in an emergency tinkering manner.

The father of the victim of the Cho Doo-soon incident has a reason.

The controversy over the terrible sexual crimes against children committed by Cho Doo-soon in 2008 is a very important event in modern Korean history.

Until that incident, the Korean judicial system did not report and deal with the case from the perspective of victims of sexual crimes against children and human rights.

In the case of Cho Doo-soon, the prosecution applied the criminal law, and the court sentenced him to 12 years in prison by applying a ``weak in mind'' reduction clause for drinking alcohol.

Then, national anger exploded, and perceptions and institutions changed slightly.

In the police investigation, a separate procedure was created for victims of sexual crimes against children, a victim rescue fund was created, the upper limit of imprisonment was raised through a law amendment, and sexual offenders of children were not remitted due to mental and physical weakness.

It's all because of the social outrage surrounding the Cho Doo-soon incident.

In short, it was a turning point to look at the human rights of victims of sexual crimes against children.

But it stopped there.

Twelve years have passed without taking a step further, and now ahead of the release of Cho Doo-soon, our society is being asked,'Is the child and adolescent sex offenders properly managed after the release?'

Father of the Victim of the Jo Doo-soon Incident

The worries of the father of the victim of the Jo Doo-soon incident are a reality around us.

A representative case of sexual crimes against children in the first half of this year.

The perpetrator committed sex crimes against six children in 2008, the same year as Jo Doo-soon, but he was also released in the first half of this year with only 12 years in prison.

And just eight days after being released, he committed a sexual crime against a child with an electronic anklet.

This time he was sentenced to 18 years in prison, but the victims and their families had already suffered irreversible circumstances.

The number of re-offending sex offenders targeting children and adolescents is increasing more and more than to be regarded as a single occurrence.

Looking at the status of sexual crimes against minors in the past 20 years, which was secured by the SBS <News Story> reporting team by filing a request for disclosure of information to the Ministry of Justice, the number of repeat offenders continued to increase from 65 in 2000 to more than 100 in 2006, 243 in 2010, 2012. It surpassed 315 people a year, 401 people in 2014, and 506 people in 2016, and soared to 569 people in 2018.

Even in terms of the recidivism rate, it has exceeded 10% in 2015 and is now recording more than 10%.

The number of re-offenders by sex offenders with electronic anklets has been on average over 60 each year over the past four years.

Although the number of recidivists is more than 60 on average per year, in reality, electronic anklets are almost the only deterrent. The number of probation officers and martial arts officers in the Ministry of Justice who monitor the attachments of electronic anklets are far less than those who are subject to surveillance.

In the Ansan area where Cho Doo-soon is released from the prison, it is a situation that 4 people have to manage 110 adherents.

Ansan City Hall said that the martial arts officer was specially appointed as a petition police officer and the police also prepared a response team, but if Cho Doo-soon moves, it is impossible for all of the personnel to follow. In reality, it cannot be a proper measure.

The former martial arts officer met by the reporters said that three people in charge worked for over four and a half years in an area where 6 to 70 people in charge of electronic anklets were managed.

In the case of e-anklets that have court restrictions, such as alcohol restrictions, there are cases in which they violate them, and in that case, profanity and riots occur, which increases the time it takes for the crackdown, and it is said that it is difficult if this happens simultaneously. .

In a hurry, they ask the police for assistance or ask other local officials for help, but in many cases they are not happy.

Moreover, recently experienced martial arts practitioners often quit, but it was confirmed that the recognition of experience in security work was not applicable.

The role of martial arts practitioners with know-how is important in order to manage subjects with a large number of people, but I was worried that there would be a gap there.

The reason why we need to pay special attention to the released child and adolescent offenders is the addiction of the crime.

Profiler Kwon Il-yong, a professor at Dongguk University's Graduate School of Police Justice, who had interviewed Cho Doo-soon, explained, "Children and juvenile offenders show symptoms of addiction and stop when opportunities are cut off due to punishment, but they cannot stop themselves."

Among the measures that the government has recently proposed, there is a content that limits alcohol consumption after Cho Doo-soon is released. Apart from criticizing how to monitor it if he drinks at home, he said that it is not a dimension that does not result in criminal habits if not drinking alcohol.

Even if such external influences and conditions disappear, the motive of aggression for committing sex crimes against women and children, which they have intrinsically, still exists.

In advanced countries such as the United States and Europe, child and adolescent sex offenders are sentenced to medium sentences from the trial stage to isolate them from society, and even if they are released, the human rights of children are given priority in consideration of the characteristics of these crimes. It contains the will to do it.

In the UK and Switzerland, sexual assault of a child faces life in prison, and Germany created a treatment regimen in 2011, which provides an unlimited number of periods of drug therapy and protection.

Supervising with an electronic anklet is also taken in the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, and Australia to restrict the perpetrators from leaving their homes for a certain period of time.

In fact, it is not that Korea did not have a discussion about the introduction of this protection system. After the Cho Doo-soon incident in 2008, the government promised to permanently quarantine the perpetrators, and then tried to introduce a detention system through the amendment of the Criminal Law in 2010. Afterwards, some members of the National Assembly promoted the introduction of a detention system in the form of legislative legislation. However, in the 18's, 19's, and 20's the National Assembly faced opposition and was scrapped. In 2014, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea made a decision to oppose the detention system, but when I saw the decision of the Human Rights Commission, the minutes of the public hearing held in the National Assembly, and the review report of the Judicial Council at the time, the reasons for the objection were almost the same. On a large scale, it was argued that there was a possibility of violating the human rights of the perpetrators such as double punishment, the fact that the upper limit on the sentence of imprisonment has already been raised through the revision of the criminal law, the sentencing of the courts is changing, and the reason is that it is relatively expensive. I don't know what else, but the argument that the imprisonment was already increased through the revision of the Criminal Law was easily understood in that the condition that was barely changed by the national anger over the Cho Doo-soon case in 2008 was used as an opposition to the introduction of a detention system for management after Cho Doo-soon was released. It didn't work. Currently, after the controversy over the release of Cho Doo-soon, 16 bills called the'Cho Doo-soon Prevention Act' have been proposed in the 21st National Assembly. Among them, there are laws related to the detention system, but there is no progress in discussion of these laws after the initiative.

The families of the victims of the Cho Doo-soon incident decided to leave Ansan after worrying about the anxiety and fear. Despite the difficult circumstances, there was not enough money to move in, and even though the state did not have a system to support the victims in this situation, the people came out. The Korea Violence Prevention Association appealed to the public just like when we raised the cost of surgery for the victims 12 years ago, and over 4,800 people collected more than 200 million won in general. Rather than writing their own name, there were many people who wrote encouraging words such as'do my best' and'I love you' in the name of the person who deposited it. Professor Eui-jin Shin (President of the Korea Violence Prevention Association) of the victim's doctor said that he would make a separate booklet and deliver it to the victim's family because it seemed that these writings on the bankbook would be a little help to the victim's family. I thought that it would be a little consolation to those who were not the perpetrators, but the victims had to leave the place they liked.

The 2008 Cho Doo-soon incident was an opportunity for the Korean judicial system to treat sex crimes as similar to other crimes due to public anger. It is a turning point in the process of investigating victims of sexual crimes against children and the human rights of victims. However, the world has not changed much during the 12 years in which Jo Doo-soon was imprisoned. Rather, other types of criminal behavior have emerged, including digital sex crimes. In the United States, only two videos of child sexual exploitation were uploaded and a 600-year sentence was sentenced, but in South Korea, even if tens of thousands of cases were uploaded, one and a half years of imprisonment is still controversial over the results of the trial. The horror reaction that South Korean society had in 2020 ahead of his release from Cho Doo-soon contains the anxiety of the people who saw and heard this reality, and the victims and potential victims who thought they were not protected from child and adolescent sex offenders. In addition, even after the release of Jo Doo-soon, a child sex offender, which has become a social symbol, the government is asking the question whether our society can be said to be better than that in 2008 if we cannot solve the management problem after the release of child sex offenders.