Gender Based Violence Law in South Korea: A Narrative Policy Framework Analysis

Gender based violence has increased by more than 4.5 percent in South Korea over the past five years. New offenses of digital sexual violence has given rise to prominent societal problems massively dropping crime safety index for women from 76.4 points in April to 54.6 points in June 2016. Although voices calling for awareness and legal system reform have existed for two decades, law enforcement against gender violence has continuously failed to meet the agreement of the National Assembly.

However, policy context of gender violence policy has recently changed in direction and a new government is committed to enactment of gender violence prevention laws. This study aims to understand the policy change using the policy narratives focusing on the role of policy narratives and strategic construction and communication of policy narratives by coalitions. The research questions are 1) How does each coalition construct its narratives in terms of stance, characters, plots, solutions and causal mechanism? 2) How does each coalition use narrative strategies in terms of scope of conflict, angel-devil shift, policy surrogate and policy belief?

To explore the research questions, we use the meso-level Narrative Policy Framework to provide systematic empirical analysis and employ content analysis of policy narratives generated in gender based violence policy subsystem over a 10-year period between 2008 and 2017. Empirical research examines narrative elements, strategies and policy belief differences within and across coalitions, the Pro-Gender based Violence Law coalition and Anti-Gender based Violence Law coalition.

We expect that the Pro-Gender Violence Law coalition is disposed to expand the scope of conflict attributing the problem to society. On the other hand, the opposite coalition contains the scope of conflict. Furthermore, relative stability, strength, and cohesion of policy belief are quantified and measured to determine whether a subsystem is collaborative or adversarial.