South Korea has banned the entry of 21 Americans convicted of sexually abusing children under 14.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security forwarded to the Ministry of Justice a list of 21 American child sex offenders known to travel frequently to Asian countries. The ministry immediately decided to permanently blacklist the offenders from entering Korea.
The U.S. has begun providing a list of child sex offenders to Asian nations such as Thailand in order to crack down on Americans traveling abroad for sex tourism. South Korea is among the nations receiving the list.
A ministry official said American sex offenders could commit sex crimes against children while teaching English at private institutes in Korea, so the moment the list was received all the offenders were banned.
Fuck you, as if there was any threat whatsoever of these individuals entering Korea, working at a school, and harming children. I guess the only way they'd get in would be if school directors and immigration were asleep at the switch and would fail to properly evaluate job applicants and their backgrounds . . . wait, nevermind, that wouldn't happen. *cough* Actually, that South Korea were on such a list says more about its notoriety as a hub of sex tourism and human trafficking than it does about its dangerous foreigners. And I've made no secret how pissed I get whenever foreigners get slandered like this in the media, considering the shit Korean teachers pulled in 2007. Whatever. Roboseyo has a longer write-up about all this, because garbage articles like this appeared in not one but four of Korea's papers today.
4 comments:
This sort of thing always offends me for a minute. But then I step back, look at the situation, realize that the people truly getting hurt by this are Koreans themselves. Koreans indulge their cultural tendencies toward racial hegemony, a few English teachers who want to come to Korea end up teaching in Taiwan and China, and the price of tutoring keeps going up. Foreign investment in Korea continues to plumet, no one speaks English, and the country elects another economically-minded president who tries to devise wacky workarounds to getting Koreans to speak the global language. Koreans turn their hate on him and elect another racist pro-North Korean president who drives the housing prices back up into the stratosphere causing Koreans to hate him.
What can you say? Historical-self-determinism? Hot tempers?
Whatever.
That's not to say people shouldn't care. They should. It's bullshit. But hopefully people realize there's some comic relief in here as well.
Yeah, it is funny, kind of in the way William Shatner thought he was creating great art here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DvQwXOCKNLY
-that is, in a self-parodying, "I'm the only one who doesn't realize how ridiculous I look wearing this hat" sort of way.
The difference is, after Shatner's farce, other Star Trek fans didn't get dirty looks on the bus, didn't get crosswise frowns from the parents of their small students, didn't have people think, "possible pedophile" because of their star trek T-shirt.
It IS funny for those on the outside, when this story's on page two, and on page one there's a headline like "Analysts Baffled by Continued Decline in Foreign Investment" but from the inside, it's less amusing.
Ouch.. What a way to pick on the foreign teachers. While it is good that those offenders were banned, but what an insult it is to publicize the ministry official's comments.
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