The alleged rape of a USFK dependent outside of Osan Airbase has just gotten stranger as the girl’s parents are refusing to cooperate with the investigation:
South Korean police said Friday that their efforts to investigate an alleged rape outside Osan Air Base are all but stalled because the accuser’s family won’t cooperate.
And, they say, they worry that the man will strike again.
The alleged victim is the daughter of an American civilian employee.
Her mother reported on Aug. 29 that her teenage daughter was attacked around 3 p.m. that day in the bar and shopping district outside Osan Air Base.
But the family has not allowed police to conduct a “rape kit” exam to check for evidence of sexual assault or to question the girl, police said, and the mother has told them to stop phoning the family.
Accordingly, police said, they’re limiting their focus on convicted sex offenders living in the area.
That limitation, they said, could give an attacker time to strike again.
A South Korean man told police he saw another man fleeing from an alley near the place where the attack was said to have occurred.
But, police said, a check of closed-circuit television footage in the area did not show anyone fleeing or otherwise acting suspiciously.
On Thursday, police said the mother gave conflicting information as to where the incident occurred. [Stars & Stripes]
It doesn’t make any sense to me at least, if the girl was raped why the family will not allow police to investigate it? Strange case with probably a lot more to the story we don’t know about.
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1:26 am on September 7th, 2008 1
It could be that the young woman does not want to cooperate, and the parents don’t want to push her. Often the trauma and humiliation of rape causes people who are otherwise quite rational to behave irrationally. However, you are probably right. There is a lot more to this than meets the eye. In the Korean context, a lot of this stuff goes unreported because of shame and fear of retaliation. I wonder if these people are Korean Americans.
10:09 pm on September 7th, 2008 2
This is a lose-lose story. Understand that Osan American HS is a small community and it will not take anyone — if they don’t know already — much time to figure out who the victim is. She will be stigmatized for the remainder of her school years.
The only option for her parents is to send her back to the states to complete her education there and start anew. If the father wants to be with his family, he will have to get a new job stateside. Not something easily done.
The DoDDS can make all the excuses they want but the kid was missing from classes — and unanswered questions remain.
The relations between the Songtan merchants at Shinjang Mall and the base community will be darkened. If this happened to one of the happy hookers that populate the Mall, no one would have said a word. But the “family shopping” image that they want to portray will be given a black mark. Nobody wants to shop in an unsafe environment.
The ROK-US relations may be darkened if this gets wider dissemination. As it is a crime against an American, there is NO media coverage. Well, be thankful for that.
All that one sees is negatives. Everything comes up bad.
But what if the girl is lying and trying to cover up some other stupid thing that teenagers have a tendency to do? The end results are the same. She will be dragged through the mud — and even if she was lying, there would always be those that say it was true. The girl remains stigmatized. Surveillance cameras didn’t reveal anyone, but that isn’t conclusive proof that nothing happened. It’s appears that the ROK police are not looking to believe the girl — and as a result, will not be actively searching for the alleged perpetrator. In return, why should the girl cooperate with them? It looks to be a messy situation.
This is not a good situation with no good answers. But the bottomline is that the Stars and Stripes should have dropped the article after the first time it reported it. This incident was something that was widely known along the Mall for over a week before the Stars and Stripes got around to reporting it. Let the issue die for the sake of all concerned.
10:21 pm on September 7th, 2008 3
My first thought about this was that something was not quite kosher.
However, I’m also aware that being victimized in such a way is complicated. Add that to the fact that anyone living in Korea for any length of time has heard of at least a couple of sexual assault cases, and knows how indifferent, ineffectual, and downright insulting Korean police can be to the victim. While I would hope that a victim would do everything in her power, including cooperating with the police, to bring the perpetrator to justice, I think it’s understandable why a family protecting a juvenile daughter may wish to not deal with the police here. I would have hoped that the military’s CID or OSI would provide some sort of liaison between the family and the local police, but I suspect that once the criminal complaint was made and jurisdiction decided, they washed their hands of it. I could be wrong.
I might be the only one, but one issue that irks me about this is how the base handled it. Initially, the security forces would not allow any female pedestrian to leave the base without somebody else to escort them (this lasted through the weekend, it continues in a reduced capacity.) I understand that this boiled down to a force protection issue with only a segment of Osan AB’s population, but I find this kind of decision to not be congruent with today’s military attitudes. Women of today’s military are not weak and in need of protection by their more masculine colleagues. One could say that this was just a temporary enforcement of the Wingman policy, but if that’s the case, then it should have been applied across the board. Another thing is that this decision really only had implications for American women; Korean women(and for that matter any Asian woman) could continue to leave the base without SPs interfering. So I guess that rape only happens to Americans in Korea.
Initially, I thought that just like the soju incident, Col. Norman is prone to boneheaded, ill thought out, reactionary decisions. However, I’ve revised my opinion. He doesn’t issue an order for these kinds of things. Instead a request is filtered down to the squadron commands requesting and suggesting they take these actions (ban soju, and no unaccompanied women off base.) It shelters Col. Norman from any sort of backlash from his decisions. Of course, this being the military, squadron commanders are only too happy to hop to. So the end result is that basically an order was given, even if that’s not the case.