Sexual Harassment and Gender-Based Violence

Sexual Harassment and Gender-Based Violence are presented as recurring conditions of Kim Jiyoung’s life, not as isolated encounters. From elementary school through employment, conduct directed at girls and women is dismissed as play, misread as flirtation, or treated as a problem for the target to manage. The pattern also extends beyond individual perpetrators: teachers, interviewers, colleagues, and company leaders help normalize or conceal harm, while the women affected must negotiate its immediate consequences.

Early Experiences and Normalization

At elementary school, Jiyoung’s first sustained difficulty with classmates came from a boy desk-mate whose behavior escalated from taking and throwing her belongings to striking her, mocking her, and hiding her schoolbag and shoe pouch. She experienced the repeated conduct as harassment, but when she sought help, Kim Eunyoung advised her to ignore him as immature, and her mother treated her distress as an overreaction to a boy who merely wanted to play. The mismatch between Jiyoung’s experience and the adults’ explanation left her with little support and no clear way to stop the behavior.

The school’s response to one incident deepened that failure. After the boy kicked Jiyoung’s indoor shoe down the classroom aisle, the teacher initially reprimanded her without establishing what had happened. The teacher later apologized, acknowledging that she had made assumptions, and Jiyoung asked through tears to be assigned a different desk-mate. Instead, the teacher told her that he liked her and that boys were meaner to girls they liked, then proposed that the incident could help them become better friends. Jiyoung rejected that interpretation: in her understanding, affection meant treating someone kindly. The scene exposes how an authority figure can recast repeated aggression as evidence of affection, shifting attention away from the harm and toward the girl’s supposed misunderstanding.

A related pattern appears around the school flasher who had been appearing near the gate and, on cloudy days, in the empty lot facing the eighth-grade classroom. When some girls shouted encouragement from the window, school authorities punished students they believed had been involved, making them perform drills and write apology letters rather than directing their attention to the man exposing himself. The girls’ anger at this reversal led five of them to wait for him, capture him in an alley, and take him to a nearby police station. The school suspended them for a week and assigned further apologies and cleaning. The flasher disappeared, but the account gives no further information about what happened to him at the station. The contrast is stark: the girls acted to stop a recurring threat, while the institution’s documented response was to discipline them.

Harassment Beyond the School Grounds

As a high-school student, Jiyoung encountered unwanted sexual attention in public transport, at cram school, and in other settings where girls had little room to respond openly. The narrative describes such conduct as common enough that the girls’ immediate recourse was often to withdraw from the situation rather than call attention to it. The problem also existed within the school. Male teachers touched students inappropriately under ordinary classroom pretexts, including a teacher who used a pointer to touch girls while claiming to check their name tags or uniforms. When one student destroyed the pointer after another incident, classmates helped remove its broken pieces, and her friend comforted her. Their response offered solidarity where the school’s everyday authority had not provided reliable protection.

Late one evening, after a cram-school seminar, Jiyoung waited at a bus stop and accepted the greeting of a male student she thought she recognized. Once the other people waiting had left, he moved close to her and followed her onto the bus. Jiyoung used a stranger’s phone to ask her father to meet her, but he was not there when she reached her stop; the male student got off too. He accused her of having previously smiled at him and passing him handouts, construing routine politeness as an invitation. A woman who had earlier noticed Jiyoung’s situation got off the bus and called after her with a scarf as a pretext, interrupting the encounter. The episode shows how a woman’s ordinary gestures could be recast as consent, while another passenger’s quick, improvised intervention created a way out.

The Workplace and the Burden of Response

The pressures did not end when Jiyoung began seeking work. Before she applied for jobs, Yun Hyejin explained that their college’s job-fair alumni were men and that recruitment recommendations could favor male students. Jiyoung had been optimistic about finding work suited to her interests; Hyejin’s account of the gendered access to recommendations and the absence of women alumni at events made her reconsider what qualifications alone could achieve. In one interview, Jiyoung and two other women were asked how they would respond if a client became physically familiar with them. Jiyoung proposed finding a natural reason to leave; another candidate said she would identify the conduct as harassment and object, while the third said she would examine her clothing and attitude for anything that had prompted it. Jiyoung later learned that she had not passed. The novel does not establish why, but the answers make visible a workplace expectation that women anticipate misconduct and that they may be judged either for confronting it or for failing to prevent it.

At the marketing agency, older male clients made jokes that Jiyoung found difficult to answer: laughing encouraged them, while not laughing invited questions about what was wrong. At a business dinner, a client division head directed appearance-based remarks and sexualized jokes at her, asked about her boyfriend, and repeatedly pressed her to drink. Jiyoung tried to avoid drinking everything by emptying some of her glass into other cups and bowls. When the man left after midnight to collect his own daughter, who was studying nearby, Jiyoung thought of the contrast between his concern for her safety and the way he had treated her. The incident makes the unequal protection particularly plain: his daughter’s vulnerability mattered to him, while Jiyoung’s discomfort did not prevent him from using his authority to place her in an unwanted and degrading situation.

Surveillance, Complicity, and Institutional Concealment

After Jiyoung had left the agency, a security agent installed a camera in the women’s restroom and uploaded images to a pornography site. A male section manager recognized the restroom and colleagues’ clothing in the images, but instead of reporting the discovery, he shared them with male coworkers. A female employee learned enough to suspect what had happened, pressed her boyfriend for an explanation, and eventually confided in Kang Hyesu. Hyesu notified the women in the office; they searched for cameras and reported the case to police. The account distinguishes the person who installed the device from those who circulated the images, but makes clear that coworkers’ distribution helped extend the violation.

The discovery left many of the women distressed and uncertain about who had seen the images. Hyesu described feeling watched and judged by strangers, and said many colleagues sought medication or therapy; some women left the company. Jiyoung, who had already departed, wondered whether she would have been among those recorded if she had stayed. The company director resisted the victims’ demands for an official apology, prevention measures, and punishment, invoking the company’s reputation and the accused men’s families. Kim Eunsil rejected those arguments and pointed out that the company had not held required staff seminars on sexual harassment. She sought advice from a women’s organization and prepared to leave with several female employees to start another business. The response thus divides between women organizing to document and challenge the abuse and management trying to contain its reputational cost.

Recurring Pattern and Significance

Across these episodes, harm is sustained not only by the original behavior but also by the explanations and procedures that follow it. Jiyoung is told that a boy’s aggression means he likes her; schoolgirls who object to a flasher are punished; an interview candidate considers whether her clothing or attitude might be blamed; and women whose images were distributed face coworkers who deny responsibility because they did not install the cameras themselves. The consequences repeatedly fall on women who must withdraw, improvise, defend their interpretation, or organize a response.

The novel’s wider account of Jiyoung’s life also gives this pattern an institutional dimension. In the psychiatrist’s later reassessment, he recognizes that his earlier understanding of her symptoms was too narrow and that following his wife’s compromises in her medical career had altered his awareness of women’s lives in Korea. That reflection does not make the earlier incidents equivalent, but it echoes the book’s insistence that experiences often dismissed as ordinary become legible when someone attends to the women who live through them. Sexual Harassment and Gender-Based Violence therefore functions as a cumulative social reality: visible in particular encounters, reinforced by everyday interpretations, and prolonged when institutions protect their authority or reputation instead of those harmed.