Exposing Dongguk University: Racialized Sexual Violence, Institutional Betrayal, and Alleged Public Funds Fraud (2016–2025)

Korea's State-Sanctioned Sex Trafficking: How Racism and Defamation Laws Target Foreign Students (updated 11:58 AM, Sunday, June 8, 2025, UTC+0)

Korea ranked 5th worst out of 89 countries in the US News & World Report "Worst Countries for Racial Equity" survey. This shocking international ranking reveals the racist foundation that enables systematic sexual violence against foreign women.

Korea Herald source

But what's even more serious is that this institutionalized racism is making foreign female students targets of sexual violence in Korean universities and the film industry.

The UN Definition Applies to Korea Today

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime defines human trafficking clearly:

"Human Trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them for profit. Men, women and children of all ages and from all backgrounds can become victims of this crime, which occurs in every region of the world. The traffickers often use violence or fraudulent employment agencies and fake promises of education and job opportunities to trick and coerce their victims."

Source: UN Office on Drugs and Crime

This describes exactly what Korea's educational institutions do to foreign women today. The only difference is Korea uses Hallyu (K-pop, K-dramas) instead of traditional trafficking operations to lure victims.

Real Testimonies: Foreign Victims Speak Out

Vivid testimonies from Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu reveal the systematic targeting:

Discrimination by Dongguk University Professor:

"被东国大老师歧视过🙋" (I've been discriminated against by a Dongguk University professor) - User 小白 (Little White)

Sexual Violence Against Foreign Students:

"上个学期还有个影像大留学生被前辈性骚扰了" (Last semester, a foreign student in the Film Department was sexually harassed by a senior) - User 愤怒的土豆汤 (Angry Potato Soup)

These testimonies from the very platforms Korea uses to recruit foreign students reveal the systematic nature of racial and sexual targeting.

Experts Expose Korean Racism Reality

Professor Jeong Hoi-ok, Myongji University:

"There's little statistical data on crimes involving foreigners or racism, and no legal provisions to punish racial hate crimes"

Professor Park Kyung-tae, Sungkonghoe University:

"We compare ourselves to countries where people are shot or stabbed because of racial hatred and say, 'It's not that bad here.' But we fail to see the daily discrimination and hatred that persist"

This institutional denial creates the perfect environment for systematic sexual violence against foreign women.

Statistical Evidence: Korea's Sexual Violence Crisis

Korean Women's Development Institute (KWDI) 2020 report shows:

Source: Korea Times

These aren't random statistics. They show deliberate targeting of programs where foreign students enroll, drawn by Korea's cultural reputation.

Why Foreign Female Students Are More Vulnerable to Sexual Violence

The combination of racism and structural vulnerabilities creates perfect targets:

  1. Visa Dependency: Fear of academic retaliation if they report incidents
  2. Language Barriers: Unable to effectively access reporting systems
  3. Social Isolation: No protective networks to help them
  4. Racial Sexual Objectification: "Baekma" (white horse) and Asian women stereotypes
  5. Institutional Indifference: Schools only care about enrollment numbers

Hallyu as Trafficking Infrastructure

Korea uses cultural soft power to create a sophisticated pipeline:

  1. False promises of education: Foreign women recruited through glossy cultural diplomacy
  2. Fraudulent institutional partnerships: Universities falsify international partnerships
  3. Systematic exploitation: Once enrolled, foreign women face racialized sexual violence, institutional retaliation, and legal barriers

The Korean government's massive Hallyu investment—including Netflix's $2.5 billion in Korean content—functions as trafficking infrastructure by making Korea appear safe and culturally sophisticated to potential victims.

Korea's defamation laws create the most insidious element of this trafficking system, specifically targeting foreign victims through racialized legal barriers.

Korea Economic Institute (KEI—registered under FARA as agent of Korean government-established KIEP) states:

"According to Article 307 of South Korea's Criminal Act, a person who publicly reveals facts that are damaging to another person is subject to punishment. Even if the statement is true, Article 310 of the Criminal Act specifies that a person is exonerated from defamation only if these facts are true and solely for the interest of the public."

Source: Korea Economic Institute

For Foreign Victims, This Creates a Devastating Triple Threat:

  1. Truth is not a defense: Unlike US/Canada, Korea criminalizes truthful statements about sexual violence
  2. Racialized "public interest" standard: Foreign victims must prove their sexual violence serves "public interest"—nearly impossible when society views them as outsiders
  3. Criminal prosecution: Victims face imprisonment for speaking about experiences
  4. Racial bias amplifies silence: Foreign victims face additional scrutiny about whether their experiences "matter" to Korean society

KEI analysis reveals this explicitly protects perpetrators:

"Critics believe that the law protects the wellbeing of powerful individuals by embedding a highly subjective test requiring proof of public interest... The #MeToo Movement in Korea further revealed that the existing defamation law impedes victims of sexual violence from speaking out."

For foreign students already facing racism, proving "public interest" becomes nearly impossible when society views them as disposable outsiders.

On May 27, 2025, Sidus Corporation sent an aggressive legal threat demanding we retract documentation of systematic sexual violence enabled by the Dongguk University–Sidus corporate partnership.

The Evidence Contradiction: Sidus claimed no connection to Dongguk for 15+ years. But Dongguk's official website (archived April 8, 2025) states:

"The department is located in the building, so-called 'Choong-Moo-Ro Yeong-Sang Center,' in which Sidus FNH, one of the top five film production companies in Korea, is based."

Archived proof

Timeline Contradictions:

Corporate history source

Classic Intimidation Tactics: Sidus's demands—immediate retraction, apology, threats of criminal/civil action—are textbook victim silencing. This is how powerful institutions suppress sexual violence reports.

Dongguk University: Evidence of Systematic Problems

Global Bar Association Response: We immediately reported Law Firm Shinwon to bar associations worldwide:

Full legal threat documentation_250527.pdf)

Historical Pattern: From Comfort Women to Foreign Students

Korea's current system mirrors Japan's WWII comfort women trafficking:

Historical Japanese System:

Contemporary Korean System:

Education for Social Justice Foundation's "Herstory" animation shows how Korean women were deceived into sexual slavery.

The cruelest irony: Korea uses its own historical victimization to build international sympathy and cultural appeal, then leverages this moral authority to lure foreign women into the same systematic sexual exploitation.

Vietnam War Pattern: Historical Precedent

Korea's targeting of foreign women isn't isolated. During Vietnam War (1964-1973), Korean soldiers committed massacres against Vietnamese civilians with documented sexual violence including "cutting off females' breasts after rape."

Korea Times source Hankyoreh analysis

As The Hankyoreh observed: "Just as Japan has ignored a resolution to the military comfort women issue, so South Koreans tend to be unwilling to confront the massacres of Vietnamese civilians as a mirror of the truth and justice they demand from Japan."

Korea's victimhood consciousness creates identical psychological conditions enabling both historical atrocities and current systematic sexual violence against foreign students.

Korea's Own History: State-Facilitated Sex Trafficking at US Bases

Korea's current targeting of foreign students isn't unprecedented—it follows decades of state complicity in sexual exploitation. A 2014 BBC investigation revealed how the Korean government actively facilitated prostitution around US military bases from the 1970s onward.

BBC News documented the systematic nature of Korean government involvement:

"More than 120 former prostitutes, who are ageing and poor, are suing not the American authorities but their own government, demanding compensation of $10,000 (£6,360) each. Their argument is that the South Korean government facilitated their work in order to keep American forces happy."

The Korean government's facilitation included:

As Dr. Kathy Moon of the Brookings Institution, author of "Sex Among Allies," explained:

"The priority was to keep the US military command happy so they would stay in Korea because there was a threat of pull-outs of US troops... The priority in the clinics was 'maintaining the health and well being of the US troops not the Korean women'."

The debt trap system mirrors today's academic exploitation:

"Anything the bar owner deemed necessary for a woman to attract GIs to sell sex - make-up, clothing, some decoration in their hut rooms - was rented out to the women... All of these expenses became part of their debt and unless you paid off this debt you couldn't leave."

Source: BBC News, "Did Korea encourage sex work at US bases?" November 28, 2014

This historical precedent reveals Korea's established pattern of using vulnerable women to serve foreign interests while protecting the systems that exploit them. The same psychological and institutional frameworks that enabled camp-town trafficking now target foreign students through academic institutions.

Racialized Targeting: The Xenophobic Dimension

Research by Korea Herald reveals persistent xenophobic attitudes targeting foreign women as sexually available and disposable.

This creates ideological foundation for treating foreign students as legitimate targets for sexual violence, evident in:

  1. Targeting patterns: Foreign women from China/Southeast Asia face disproportionate violence
  2. Institutional response: Additional barriers including language discrimination, visa threats
  3. Social isolation: Systematic isolation from support networks

Industry Censorship: Coordinated Information Control

Our documentation reveals systematic censorship across Korean film platforms:

Full censorship documentation

This coordinated suppression shows Korean institutions understand the gravity and actively prevent foreign students from accessing protective information.

Gender Faculty Imbalance: Structural Design

Documentation shows systematic gender imbalances in film faculty that enable sexual violence through tokenistic representation rather than meaningful gender balance.

Dongguk University's Tokenism Strategy: At Dongguk's Graduate School of Digital Image & Contents, initial analysis showed an entirely male faculty. However, deeper investigation reveals a more insidious pattern: tokenistic inclusion of women in powerless positions while men maintain decision-making authority.

The actual ratio is approximately 13 male to 6 female professors, but this numerical representation masks structural inequality:

Power Concentration Among Male Faculty:

Women Relegated to Marginal Roles:

How Tokenism Enables Sexual Violence: This power structure creates perfect conditions for sexual violence against foreign students:

  1. No female advocates in power: Women faculty lack institutional authority to protect students or challenge male colleagues
  2. Silencing mechanisms: Female faculty in precarious positions cannot risk confronting sexual violence without jeopardizing their own careers
  3. Male protection networks: Concentrated male power creates in-group loyalty that protects perpetrators
  4. Appearance of progress: Numerical representation provides cover while maintaining male dominance in practice

International Deception: Dongguk's English website completely erases female faculty, presenting an entirely male department to international audiences. This deliberate misrepresentation prevents foreign students from recognizing the risk environment they're entering.

This pattern extends across Korean film programs: K-Arts, Chung-Ang University, and Dongguk University all maintain male-controlled power structures that make sexual violence against vulnerable foreign women structurally inevitable.

Faculty analysis

International Law Violations

Korea's system violates multiple international laws:

UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons: Recruitment through deceptive promises followed by systematic sexual exploitation

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Defamation laws criminalizing truthful speech violate Article 19 (freedom of expression)

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW): Systematic failure to protect foreign women combined with legal frameworks punishing victims

The Victimhood Blind Spot

Korea's "national victimhood consciousness" creates psychological conditions enabling current abuse:

This "selective moral memory" enables Korea to demand Japanese accountability for historical sexual violence while denying accountability for current systematic abuse.

The Reality Korea Faces

The goal is to attract 300,000 foreign students by 2027, but there are no basic safety measures in place.

If this continues:

Necessary Reforms

Legal Reform:

  1. Reform defamation laws: Allow truth as complete defense, following international standards
  2. Criminalize institutional retaliation against victims
  3. Establish independent oversight of university sexual violence prevention

Institutional Accountability:

  1. Mandate gender-balanced faculty in all programs
  2. Multilingual independent reporting system
  3. Reporting procedures that guarantee visa safety
  4. Zero-tolerance policy for sexual objectification/racism
  5. Transparent incident disclosure and auditing
  6. Legal protections for foreign victims who report sexual violence

International Pressure:

  1. Suspend educational partnerships with non-compliant Korean institutions
  2. Condition cultural/economic agreements on human rights compliance
  3. Establish international monitoring of foreign student safety

Conclusion: Modern Trafficking State

Korea's weaponization of Hallyu to recruit foreign women into sexually violent academic environments, protected by criminalized defamation laws and corporate legal threats, constitutes state-sanctioned trafficking.

Racism, defamation laws, and sexual violence form a devastating combination that specifically targets foreign students. Korea's legal system protects perpetrators while criminalizing victims—especially foreign victims who already face racial discrimination.

The Sidus legal threat exemplifies this system: when sexual violence accountability is documented, powerful institutions deploy legal intimidation to silence victims and protect perpetrators.

Every foreign student recruited to Korean universities through cultural appeal represents a potential trafficking victim, lured by false promises and trapped by systems designed to exploit and silence them.

The comfort women of today are not historical figures—they are foreign women studying in Korean universities right now, suffering in silence because truth itself has been criminalized to protect their perpetrators.

Only by reforming both social attitudes and legal frameworks can Korea become a true international education hub rather than a modern trafficking state.

A Message for Survivors

"If you complied out of fear, isolation, confusion — you were not consenting. If you thought it was the only way to survive, you are not alone. The system was designed to break your boundaries, not protect them. You are not the problem. You are proof of the problem."

Additional Resources:

Corporate intimidation will not silence accountability advocacy. Korea's trafficking system must be exposed and dismantled.

Korean Press Silencing: Defamation Laws Create Media Blackout

The systematic nature of Korea's trafficking system becomes evident when examining the complete silence from Korean media despite extensive documentation and outreach efforts.

59 Emails, Zero Coverage: The Chilling Effect in Action

Since March 14, 2025, we have conducted comprehensive outreach to Korean media outlets, sending detailed documentation of systematic sexual violence against foreign students to:

Investigative Media (March 14, 2025):

Mainstream Media (April 6, 2025):

Total Outreach: 59 emails across multiple outlets and recipients over nearly 3 months (through June 8, 2025)

Media Response: Zero responses, zero articles, zero coverage across internet, TV, radio, or print

Complete email documentation (base64 encoded) Decoded email evidence

Defamation Laws: Truth is Not a Defense

This media blackout directly connects to Korea's weaponized defamation laws, as documented by Freedom House:

"Defamation is a criminal offense that carries sentences of up to seven years in prison, and reporters or commentators who criticize the government are occasionally threatened with or prosecuted on defamation charges. In October 2014, prosecutors indicted Tatsuya Kato, then the Seoul bureau chief of the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun, on a charge of defaming President Park by citing rumors about the president's activities on the day of the Sewol ferry disaster, which killed about 300 people. In December 2015, the Seoul Central District Court acquitted Kato, ruling that he had engaged in a protected form of speech. At year's end, several other criminal defamation complaints filed by the Park administration against media outlets or journalists were pending."

Source: Freedom House - Freedom of the Press 2016 - South Korea

Current Press Freedom Crisis Under Yoon Administration

The situation has deteriorated further under President Yoon Suk-yeol's administration, as documented by The Diplomat:

"The Yoon administration's aggressive posture toward the media marks a significant escalation in legal actions against journalists. In just the first 18 months of Yoon's presidency, his government pursued defamation cases related to at least 11 instances of coverage, a stark increase from the actions taken by his predecessor over the previous four years. This shift points to a deliberate strategy to silence critical media voices through legal intimidation."

The systematic targeting includes:

Source: The Diplomat - South Korea's Press Freedom Under Fire

The Perfect Silencing System

Korean defamation laws create the perfect mechanism to protect sexual violence perpetrators:

  1. Criminal prosecution threat: 7-year prison sentences deter coverage
  2. Truth irrelevant: Even accurate reporting can be prosecuted
  3. "Public interest" barrier: Subjective standard protects powerful individuals
  4. Foreign victim discrimination: Additional burden to prove their cases matter to Korean society

This legal framework ensures that systematic sexual violence against foreign students remains invisible to Korean society, protected by the threat of criminalizing anyone who documents it.

International Recognition of Press Freedom Crisis

The international community has documented Korea's deteriorating press environment:

The complete silence from Korean media on documented sexual violence cases reveals how effectively these laws function to protect perpetrators and silence accountability advocacy.