A source report from Yonhap (2025-08-29): 합의하고 했다고?…교수에게 몹쓸 짓 당한 피해자의 긴박한 신고

A female student barricaded in a bathroom texted 112 for help, writing “무서워요… 도와주세요” (“I’m scared… please help me”) as a professor allegedly tried to force entry. Despite contemporaneous distress messages and a later clinical assessment indicating acute suicide risk, police initially issued a non-referral decision after accepting the professor’s claim that the sexual contact was consensual. This is a familiar pattern: institutions privileging powerful men’s narratives over survivor safety in cases of sexual violence.

What happened

• The survivor texted 112 from a locked bathroom in a rural house, reporting fear and repeated knocking on the door.
• Multiple “도와주세요” (“please help me”) messages were sent; some failed due to weak signal. Protection arrived after a delay.
• Despite the real-time SOS and a support-center report noting severe psychological distress, police accepted the alleged perpetrator’s “consensual” explanation and declined to move the case forward until prosecutors requested re-investigation.

Why this matters

• Consent cannot be inferred from the absence of immediate physical resistance during coercive, fear-dominated situations. Survivors often comply under a fawn response to minimize harm; compliance is not consent.
• Status bias (“봐주기 수사”, lenient investigation) operates when institutions give greater credibility to professors, executives, or other VIPs than to survivors of sexual violence.
• Emergency protocols still undervalue contemporaneous digital evidence (SOS texts, timestamps, threat descriptions) compared to suspects’ after-the-fact claims.

What the messages reveal operationally

• The survivor used SMS to avoid alerting the nearby assailant—risk-aware behavior that should trigger a protection-first response.
• Dispatch sequencing prioritized house details before fully triaging imminent threat (attempted entry, confinement, lack of window). In rural signal dead zones, undelivered messages need automatic escalation.

A system problem, not an isolated case

The posture that privileges powerful men’s narratives echoes the corruption ecology revealed by Burning Sun: selective enforcement, protection of VIPs, and accountability that only materializes after publicity. That same culture surfaces here when a professor’s “consent” claim outweighs the survivor’s contemporaneous evidence of fear and confinement.

What must change (concrete reforms)

1. Survivor-centered presumption when contemporaneous fear signals exist; preserve evidence first, litigate consent later.
2. Mandatory secondary review for any decision to decline referral in sexual-violence cases, with written justification tied to objective evidence.
3. Publish precinct-level time-to-protection metrics; audit outliers.
4. Harden 112 SMS: priority store-and-forward, delivery confirmations, low-bandwidth location beacons, and “panic macro” options for barricaded scenarios.
5. Update dispatcher scripts to front-load threat triage and immediate protective directives; move descriptive questions to the second beat.
6. Co-dispatch with sexual-violence–trained officers and ensure immediate survivor support access without delaying forensic options.

This case is a clear reminder: institutions must center survivor safety and evidence-based practice, not the reputational comfort of the powerful. Until the system changes, racialized sexual violence and impunity will persist behind closed doors and locked bathroom doors alike.