On March 11th 2021, victim survivors from the Brothers Welfare Institution stood with their families before the Supreme Court in South Korea, crying with anger. This was after the dismissal of an emergency appeal regarding allegations of forcible confinement by the institution's Director Park. The Korean Supreme Court decided that the emergent appeal was not applicable to the acquittal of the Director Park because his forced institutionalization was carried out in accordance with Ministry of Internal Affairs Ordinance No. 410. In other words, no one was charged with a crime for this mass involuntary confinement because it was done in keeping with the law, even though the Supreme Court had decided that the ordinance was unconstitutional.
The Brothers Welfare Institution was established in 1975 with the purpose of buranga seondo, 1 meaning the instruction of vagrants. 2 Three thousand five hundred citizens, including both children and adults, were confined there against their will. They were forced to labor, most or all were physically and sexually abused, and some were murdered. During the twelve years from its foundation until the exposition of the gruesome truth to South Korean citizens in 1987, six hundred thirteen people died there. Some of them were secretly buried and some of their bodies have never been found. After the revision of the Enforcement Decree of Framework Act on Settling the Past for Truth and Reconciliation in 2020, the South Korean government reopened their investigation into the Brothers Welfare Institution. Some of the victim survivors have filed state claims for indemnification, and several trials have been held in court. As of October 2024, seven court cases have reached decisions on the state indemnifications, affirming that the case of the Brothers Welfare Foundation Institution was a case of serious human rights violations by the state against plaintiffs' freedoms of body and dignity. However, the government appealed all seven court decisions to a higher court, claiming that the statute of limitations for these cases had expired. As of this writing, the Korean government has paid no compensation to the victims or their families.
How did this mass institutionalization by the Korean government come to pass in the 1980s, a time when South Korea experienced both rapid economic growth and significant progress toward a more democratic society? This article explores how the media constructed vagrancy as a way to justify state violence against Korean citizens in the 1980s. The forced institutionalization of individuals deemed vagrants at that time needs to be understood as part of the modernization project in South Korea. Korean society excluded a certain group of people who were considered out of place in the image of a developed country. This exclusion also took place in the political context of South Korea in the 1980s. By analyzing news discourses, I unfold how the state used the language of vagrancy and institutionalization as elements of the politics of fear, furthering the agenda of welfare nation as a strategy to gain and increase its power.
The discourse of vagrancy also connects to disability; oppressive practices against vagrants and disabled people have shared foundations of ableism and biopolitics. Not only does the survivors' legal battle continue, but the practice of institutionalization itself remains an ongoing issue in South Korea. According to a recent report on residential facilities, 67.9 percent of residents with disabilities were institutionalized involuntarily (National Human Rights Commission of Korea, 2018). In August 2021, responding to a longstanding request from disability advocates and human rights activists, the Korean government announced a roadmap for the transformation of residential facilities. Immediately, an alliance of thirty organizations, including Women with Disabilities Empathy (WDE), Homeless Action, Disability and Human Rights in Action, and Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination, announced their shared concerns and called for universal deinstitutionalization for all residents—not merely reforming existing facilities (Gwangju Ingwonjigi et al, 2021). However, the advocates are still struggling to gain support from the media and now face a backlash against their activism to close down institutions for people with disabilities. The ongoing battle demonstrates that the issue of institutionalization remains an urgent matter today.
The Korean words for vagrant—burangin, burangja or buranga—historically do not indicate a single fixed group of people. It took on different definitions over the years under the influence of social propaganda (Soyoung Lee, 2014; Ye, 2014) and referred to different types of people at different times. Like the English root words of vagrant (wanderer, roamer), the Korean root words underlying burang mean an ocean wave and to float, thus also describing wandering. In the early Chosun dynasty period (1392-1910), burang denoted an individual's characteristics, such as laziness or intemperance. During Japanese colonization (1910-1945), burangja was ostensibly used to refer to young people from ruling class families (i.e., yangaban), having no jobs and being inclined to gambling and drinking (Ye, 2014). However, it was also understood as an attack by the colonizers on the old ruling class, and a tactic to remove political groups that might oppose Japanese colonization (Ye, 2014).
During democratic movements against dictators and military regimes from the 1960s to the 1980s in South Korea, buranga became a label for orphans or children with families, students, people in urban poverty, and anyone who was forced into labor for the government (Choi, 2016; Soyoung Lee, 2014). Ministry of Internal Affairs Ordinance No. 410, titled Guide for Declaration, Regulation, Internment, Custody, and Follow-up Management after Returning Home for Vagrants (Republic of Korea Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1975) was enacted on December 15, 1975, under the iron fist of a military dictatorship and in the context of a mass population movement into urban areas. The order was delivered to every city, province, and police department across the nation as an internal guideline. It was used as the legal grounds to control vagrants, take them into custody, and force them into confinement. The department finally abolished Ordinance No. 410 in March of 1987 because it was criticized for leading to human rights violations, including the possibility of arbitrary detention and restrictions on individual freedoms. However, the debate over institutionalization continues after the abolishment to the present day.
In particular, the verbiage of Ordinance No. 410 (1975) implicates practically all Korean citizens as potential burangin (Soyoung Lee, 2014). Some of the child and adult victims who were categorized and institutionalized as vagrants during this time testified that they were suddenly arrested on the street and incarcerated for being considered vagrants. By far the biggest wave of mass institutionalization against citizens under the label of vagrant happened during the Fifth Republic (1979-1987). As of 1987, there were ten institutions for vagrant children, and twenty-seven institutions for adults (J. Park, 2022). Twelve thousand eight hundred seventy inmates lived in vagrant institutions in 1989, and seventy-five percent of those residents had disabilities (Ministry of Health & Welfare Year Book).
The following testimonies of survivors (J. Han et al., 2012; Jin, 2021; YTN, 2022) show how the use of the vagrancy label was arbitrary and victimized citizens, including both adults and children, during the crackdown period in the 1980s. Han, a seven-year-old boy, was asked by his father to stay at their neighborhood police station for a while. However, on that day he was taken against his will to the Brothers Welfare Institution and then spent three years there, unable to escape. Similarly, a boy named Lee was brought to the police station by his father at age twelve (Jin, 2021). His father asked the police to discipline Lee for misbehaving while the father went out grocery shopping. The officers instead turned the boy over to the vagrancy crackdown team and he ended up in the Brothers Welfare Institution. They told his father that Lee had run away from the police station, and so he became a missing child. A seven-year-old girl named Lee, who got lost on the way to see her mother, was incarcerated even though she gave police her grandmother's phone number and address (Somin Kim, 2022). Many other victim survivors have similarly noted that their family members had reported them missing during this time. Seol was kidnapped by strangers while riding his bike and imprisoned at the Brothers Welfare Institution, where his father was unable to find him (YTN, 2022). The Brothers Welfare Institution changed the child's name to make it impossible to find him (YTN, 2022). The only rationale for Korean government's abuses was the subjectively applied label of burangin, burangja, or buranga.
The similar words nosukin and nosukja, meaning people without housing or homeless people, were often used as synonyms for burangin or burangja (H. Han, 2000; Soohyun Kim, 1999; J. Kim, 2010; Yongchan Park, 2001). However, they rarely appeared in the media before South Korea's debt crisis in 1997 (i.e., IMF era 3). Their use reflected the increase of homelessness during this particular social economic context. In contrast, the Korean government manipulated the vagrancy discourse in the 1980s. They arrested and institutionalized many citizens labeled vagrants. In this paper I argue that the media supported this state violence. Since I focus on how the media constructed vagrancy discourse in supporting Korean government's violence, I focus only on burangin, burangja, and buranga as key words for this research.
To explore how the newspaper media constructed vagrancy issues and vagrants, and how these medial discourses can be understood in the reproduction of state power, I employ critical discourse analysis (Gee, 1999; Wodak & Meyer, 2009). Critical discourse analysis addresses power relations between texts and society. This type of analysis can provide a nuanced understanding of the oppressive history of forced institutionalization, such as increasing the visibility of hegemonic narratives and power mechanisms that have oppressed marginalized groups. I approach discourse as a place where "social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context" (van Dijk, 2001, p.352). I consider media texts related to vagrancy issues as being "ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power" (Fairclough, 1995, p.132). Discourse analysis plays a key role in applying and adjusting theories and perspectives of disability studies with empirical data in various contexts (Grue, 2011). It can also help us understand the impact of media discourses on social policies and practices and the media influence on marginalizing people.
In order to develop an initial data pool of newspaper articles I used keyword searches in the Naver News Library (http://newslibrary.naver.com). Search from 1945 to 1999, I found 1,077 articles in four national daily newspapers—Kyunghyang Shinmun (Kyunghyang Newspaper), Dong-a Ilbo, (Dong-a Daily), Maeil Business Newspaper, and Hankyoreh—that include the keywords burangin, burangja, or buranga. The initial search revealed an uneven distribution of articles across years in the newspaper archives (Table 1). In 1987, news media published the most articles relating to vagrancy because of two incidents at the Brothers Welfare Institution and Seongjiwon [the Holy Land Institution]. The number of news articles regarding burangin or burangja also spiked again in 1998 because of a sharp increase in the number of nosukja or homeless people during the IMF era (1997-2001). Some of these articles used the words burangin or burangja, either as synonyms for nosukja or in explicit contrast to nosukja. To understand how vagrancy was constructed in the 1980s, I analyzed 284 news articles published only from 1980 to 1990.
| Year | 1945 | 1946 | 1947 | 1948 | 1949 | 1950 | 1951 | 1952 | 1953 | 1954 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 6 |
| Year | 1955 | 1956 | 1957 | 1958 | 1959 | 1960 | 1961 | 1962 | 1963 | 1964 |
| N | 4 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 11 | 4 | 13 | 13 | 16 | 6 |
| Year | 1965 | 1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 |
| N | 1 | 5 | 10 | 6 | 6 | 9 | 6 | 7 | 11 | 9 |
| Year | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 |
| N | 4 | 3 | 18 | 4 | 40 | 7 | 16 | 11 | 14 | 10 |
| Year | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 |
| N | 7 | 7 | 119 | 29 | 24 | 40 | 40 | 56 | 51 | 48 |
| Year | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | |||||
| N | 56 | 75 | 59 | 121 | 53 |
Critical discourse analysis plays a critical role in shaping my approach to textual data from newspaper articles which I use to reveal social ideas about vagrants. I analyze the discourses used in newspapers in relation to vagrants. In particular, I use Gee's (2011) discourse analysis toolkit to interrogate textual data. I approach the text with certain questions in mind to help visualize the context: "How is what the speaker is saying, and the way he or she is saying it, helping to create, shape, or manipulate what listeners will take as the relevant context?" or "Is the speaker reproducing such contexts unaware of certain aspects of them, that if he or she thought about the matter consciously, he or she would not want to reproduce?" (Gee, 2011, p.85) In addition, I pay attention to textual silences (Huckin, 2002), in particular discreet and manipulative silences. A textual silence is defined as "the omission of some piece of information that is pertinent to the topic at hand," (Huckin, 2002, p.348) that avoids stating sensitive information or hides relevant information for someone's benefit. Then I implemented an analytic process of "[d]etermining what could have been said yet wasn't" (p.353). As a result of critical discourse analysis, I find that vagrants were constructed as unsightly objects, threatening figures, and targets for rehabilitation in South Korea in the 1980s.
The media constructed vagrants as unsightly objects while the Korean government targeted them for removal and implemented an oppressive crackdown against them. Both the government and the media rationalized the crackdown by claiming that the presence of vagrants was a blemish on the ideal image of Korea. With the 1988 Seoul Olympics ahead, the Korean government and the private sector promoted saenghwal [life] Olympics ("saenghwal Olympics," 1986) in order to "create a bright and clean Olympics environment" (Jang, 1988; "saenghwal Olympics," 1986). This campaign included several goals, such as improving the level of food hygiene, preventing environmental pollution, health management, improving public and private services, and organizing and cleaning roads (Jang, 1988; "saenghwal Olympics," 1986). The Life Olympics committee established several targets for removal before the Olympics, such as unpleasant odors from farmers' markets and slaughterhouses, dead trees, daily noise, traffic jams, etc. The targets for removal included not only elements of the physical environment but also human beings, namely burangin. The Korean government announced it would make the streets vagrant-free in preparation for the 1988 Olympics to give tourists a good impression of Korea as a clean country and "get rid of citizens' distaste" ("burangini eopseojinda," 1981). Vagrants became a loathsome object that could ruin a cheerful atmosphere and a clean and bright environment, so they needed to be removed from public view, especially from the sight of foreigners ("burangini eopseojinda," 1981). This idea of "cleaning" is well captured in the Ministry of Internal Affairs Ordinance No. 410 (1975). According to this ordinance, burangin should be policed in order to establish a sound and clear social atmosphere and purify urban environments, under the justification that this would help needy neighborhood residents.
In order to complete this mission, Seoul's municipal government conducted an intensive crackdown on vagrants who were begging on the streets and sidewalks. The crackdown team comprised of police and civil officers sent them either to their homes or to an institution ("jipjung dansok," 1988) even though the survivors' testimony reveal that they were neither beggars nor vagrants. Dong-a Ilbo ("jipjung dansok," 1988) reported that the City of Seoul had arrested two thousand vagrants and sent three hundred to institutions by the end of April 1988. The Seoul municipal government conducted a similar control exercise in 1986. It announced its intention to institutionalize all beggars and vagrants—including gum sellers, bulguja [cripples], tuberculosis patients, blind people, etc.—for the duration of the Asian Games in September 1986. The city had a crackdown policy in place during three special control periods with the cooperation of police ("jipdan suyong," 1986). According to Korean police yearly data (J. Park, 2022), there were 63,083 crackdown cases on vagrants nationwide between 1981 and 1987.
The 1988 Olympics justified the discriminatory and oppressive crackdown practice against Korean citizens. It was not merely an international sporting event but Korea's greatest opportunity to show off to the world, particularly with respect to its recent economic growth (Soyoung Lee, 2017). The existence of vagrants contradicted the agenda of proclaiming their national success. For example, the newspaper editorial delivered concerns that the presence of vagrants would make Korea lose face with foreign visitors during the Olympics ("burangin daechaegeomna," 1988). The media also marked vagrants as a national bulmyeongye [dishonor]. The newspaper Hankyoreh used a similar lens to report about the United States. This Korean newspaper considered the existence of homeless or burangin in the United States its chibu [embarrassment] ("simgakan," 1989) and a sign of a failure of capitalism as well as evidence that the United States had lost the American dream ("kkumeul ileun narainga," 1990). In connection to development discourse, Hankyoreh also described vagrants as belonging to jesamsegye [the third world] ("simgakan chibu," 1989).
In short, vagrants were described and constructed as a national shame, far from the national pride and economic growth that the Korean media discourse wished to exhibit before the watching world (Soyoung Lee, 2016). The governmental action in response to this contradiction was to clean away their presence in public. This was similar to the construction of disabled bodies in Western contexts, often being "engaged in valued cultural work that reinforces dominant values and practices" (Davis, 2011, p.5). Echoing this rhetorical contrast between unsightly bodies and social ideals, disability was more likely to be used as a metaphor to represent poverty, the lack of development, the results of colonialism, injustice and violence in the West and Korea (Davidson, 2008; E. Kim, 2011; Sherry, 2007). Vagrants in 1980s South Korea were likewise viewed as contradicting the image of the developed country, even though the industrialization of South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s had resulted in urban poverty and industrial accidents had caused more people to become disabled.
Public discourse in South Korea treated vagrants as unpleasant bodies that needed to be hidden away from public sight, for both the environment and the national image. It also treated vagrants as dangerous bodies. Both Ministry of Internal Affairs Ordinance No. 410 and newspaper articles villainized vagrants, portraying them as threats to social order, without presenting specific incidents, crimes, or other evidence to support this claim. The second chapter of Ministry of Internal Affairs Ordinance No. 410 (1975) defined vagrants as persons who impede geonjeonhan sahoe mit dosi jilseo [healthy society and urban order]. It justified policing vagrants as a security measure for blocking the activities of beombeopja [criminals] and bulsunbunja [insubordinates].
The discourse of vagrants as threats to Korean society was consistently delivered in news articles that referred to vagrants as georijilseo pagoeja [destroyers of street order] who disrupted public order (Sungsoo Lee, 1987). The newspaper Hangyreh (H. Kim, 1988) criticized vagrants for making a city their own mubeopcheonji [lawless world] and converting a park into their burangindeurui sogul [den of vagrants]. Kyunghyang Shinmun ("chiani malsseumanida," 1987) delivered its concerns in an editorial titled, "Chian [public safety] is extremely poor—How can we have democratization after the collapse of sahoegigang [public discipline]?" The article reported the increasing presence of vagrants in public, using this as evidence of the absence of social order. The article named vagrants along with criminals such as burglars, assailants, and rapists as a direct threat to public safety ("chiani malsseumanida," 1987). It described various violent crimes striking readers with anxiety and terror but did not offer evidence or describe incidents to support their claims. To the contrary, only 15 percent of inmates in the Brothers Welfare Institution had criminal records, and children and adolescents comprised 29.9 percent of the total number of inmates there in 1985, according to the most current statistical report on the institution (J. Park, 2022).
Fear regarding vagrants circulated among the public in the 1980s (J. Han et al., 2012), during the Fifth Republic of Korea (March 1981-February 1988). The government was an oppressive military regime that seized power in a 1980 coup that killed and injured Korean citizens of all ages. This military regime imprisoned and tortured members of opposing political parties as well as many political activists. This regime attempted to stabilize its own power by making vagrants into scapegoats (M. Kim, 2013). The government pointed to them as the source of other citizens' fear and anxiety, thus justifying the use of state violence and unconstitutional power to oppress them. Aligned with this attempt, the media described children and adults whom it labeled vagrants as social threats. This discourse of vagrants and fear continued during the regime change. The media claimed vagrants took advantage of jeonhwangi [transition time] ("burangin boho jochi," 1987; "chiani malsseumanida," 1987). These news articles stated that more vagrants were "active," and implied that this was due to decreased security during the transition. In 1987, the Korean political system changed radically from the Fifth Republic to the Sixth Republic. Because of the June Democratization Movement, the Korean constitution was amended (October 27, 1987) so that presidential elections would be direct elections for the first time since 1971.
Opposing this movement toward political and social change, the campaign slogan of the ruling military party (Minjeongdang [Democratic Justice Party]) was to "move forward with stability or go back to social chaos" (C. Kim, 1987). Around the time of the direct presidential election in 1987 there was a significant discourse about social anomie. This discourse intended to make people fearful and anxious. Therefore, people might be convinced by the ruling party's propaganda about the risk of electing a new democratic leader in place of the military leader who had been in power. Kyunghyang Shinmun ("chiani malsseumanida," 1987) reported that "Korean citizens" felt anxious even though democratization and the presidential election were positive developments. There was a tactical connection between democratization, regime change, and social turmoil created in the news media in 1987. Newspaper articles solidified this link by reporting on the increase of vagrants and equating them with social chaos (burangin boho jochi," 1987; "chiani malsseumanida," 1987). Mr. Lo, the head of the ruling military party, ran his electoral campaign on "strong security" and "maintain stability" in South Korea ("4 hubo majimak jumaldaegyeol," 1987). Similarly, the media highlighted supposed causes of social chaos, including vagrancy and the democratization movement.
The media discourse did not stop at portraying vagrants as threats to society but supported the institutionalization of vagrants by describing it as an example of the government's ability to maintain social order in Korea. The Korean government used institutionalization to exert power and control over not only vagrants but also the Korean public in general. A. Kim (2011) argues that the military regime (1981-1988)'s policy on buranga was based on treating these children as a social problem and the solution was to remove them from the street. Government-run and publicly-funded institutions brought institutionalized children into forced labor, arguing it was essential for establishing social order. The government believed that doing so would be one of the greatest accomplishments of their regime.
Along with the discourse of unsightly objects and social threats in Korean society, the institutionalization of people labeled as vagrants continued with an emphasis on their moral needs under the discourse of rehabilitation. In the 1980s, the newspapers raised ethical and legal concerns over the institutionalization of vagrants. News of the inmates' escape from the Brothers Welfare Institution and the Holy Land Institution in 1987 and the ensuing exposé of conditions at the institutions for vagrants changed the media discourse. Newspaper articles, including one titled, "Is the welfare institution a hell?" ("bokjiwoneun bongmajeoninga," 1987), described the institutions' horrible living conditions, exploitation of inmates, and administrators' crimes against inmates.
Korean media realized that the Korean government should be more aware of human rights of inmates if South Korea wanted to claim to be a free, democratic country ("ingwon pagoeui gyohun," 1987). In addition, the news media argued that violations of human rights contradicted the image of the developed, Western countries whose example South Korea was attempting to follow ("ingwon pagoeui gyohun," 1987). Korea has enthusiastically adopted Western ideologies in the interest of survival and established its compressed modernity since the Korean enlightenment period (the late nineteenth century until 1920), and the colonial period (1910-1945) (Eggert et al, 2022; E. Jung, 2022; Y. Jung, 2003).
Nevertheless, despite the ethical concerns about human rights for inmates in the Brothers Welfare Institution and the Holy Land Institution, there was no discussion of deinstitutionalization. The media framed this issue as the result of a few bad institutions rather than a systemic problem inherent in institutionalization itself. There was the absence of any deinstitutionalization discourse. The title of the news article was: "Two hundred twenty-one inmates of the Holy Land institution create an uproar to escape" ("inmates caught," 1987). It highlighted that five hundred police officers were mobilized and two hundred nineteen escapees were caught ("inmates caught," 1987). The news media delivered the inmates' testimony that life in the Holy Land Institution was like a living hell, where unbearable assault and beatings were rampant ("talchul 2 myeong pongno," 1987). The inmates in the Holy Land Institution also were desperate to go home, crying out, "Please send us home" (Sungsoo Lee, 1987). Yet news articles portrayed these inmates as abandoned by their families and society, ignoring the fact that they were not abandoned but forcibly confined. The government's solution to this crisis—both the escape and the outcry over conditions at the institution—was simply to return the escaped inmates to the same institution.
The inmates from both institutions of the Brothers Welfare Institution and the Holy Land Institution raised issues of forced imprisonment ("ingwon pagoeui gyohun," 1987; Won & Kang, 1987) and of unpaid labor (Sungsoo Lee, 1987). However, the newspaper Kyunghyang emphasized the problems of inmate overpopulation ("burangin siseol," 1987) and the institutions' inability to manage inmates ("gotongeul nanwo gatja," 1987). These articles limited the analysis of the problem to such matters as poor living conditions, corruption, and a lack of public attention (burangin siseol," 1987; "gotongeul nanwo gatja," 1987). The media did not address the fundamental issue of institutionalizing citizens labeled as vagrants. While the newspaper articles described maltreatment, violence and abuse in the Brothers Welfare Institution and the Holy Land Institution as human right issues, the media remained silent about the human right not to be forced into confinement by the government. In a similar vein, the media continued its support for institutionalization with the rationale of rehabilitation.
The rehabilitation discourse was connected to the discourse of threatening figures. Part of the media's response to the issue was to express fear of deinstitutionalization, particularly after inmates of the Brothers Welfare Institution were discharged. Hankyore (H. Kim, 1988) published one reader's letter to the editor, which captured this fear. The article asked for a new institution to replace the current one. It called for an institution that would fulfill "its original purpose of edification and rebirth" (H. Kim, 1988). Kyunghyang Shinmun ("burangin daechaegeomna," 1988) stated strongly that leaving vagrants behind due to a lack of available institutions was like training criminals. Kyunghyang Shinmun also claimed that institutionalizing and protecting vagrants was an international trend (Sungsoo Lee, 1987). In a similar vein, Maeil Business Newspaper ("jaehwaljido dwaeya," 1987) discussed a private jail in the US. The article described the private jail system contributing to make people "regret their faults" and "turn good." The article says it rehabilitated vagrants and returned them to society.
Newspaper discourse maintained the idea that the institution was a place that provided some sort of living space to people who had been abandoned by society (Yoonsuk Park, 1987) when in fact it was Korean society that confined them to the institution. The newspapers that described unethical practices at certain institutions nevertheless continued to advocate for the majority of welfare facilities. One news article asked readers to remember that "a lot of welfare institutions give back a human life to vagrants, even in difficult situations, with their spirit of love and service" (Yoonsuk Park, 1987). Behind this rationale there was a shift from the media discourse of crime and punishment to that of rehabilitation. The rehabilitation discourse highlighted the disorder of vagrants' bodily conditions instead of characterizing vagrants as a disorder of society. In the same vein, the media called on government to establish a welfare policy replacing surveillance with the Ordinance 410, not only for protecting these "misfits" or incapable persons but also for returning them to normal social life through rehabilitative education ("jaehwaljido dwaeya," 1987).
In the same pathological discourse, rehabilitation aimed at transforming vagrants into healthy social beings of sound mind ("jaehwaljido dwaeya," 1987). They were characterized as people who had failed to adapt due to their lack of physical and mental ability. For instance, they were called misfits ("bujeogeungja"), incompetent ("muneungnyeokja") ("jaehwaljido dwaeya," 1987) and abnormal ("bijeongsangin") (Yoonsuk Park, 1987). The article described their lack of normal thinking and physical activity ability, as well as difficulty in harmonizing with normal people because of their negligent temperament and bad attitude (Sungsoo Lee, 1987). The media also used social pathology ("sahoebyeongnihyeonsang") to frame the vagrancy issue as one of the root causes of disease ("byeongso") in the body of our society ("gotongeul nanwo gatja," 1987), Suggesting that the solution was the service of rehabilitation provided by institutions. ("burangin daechaegeomna," 1988; "jaehwaljido dwaeya," 1987).
While promoting rehabilitation as a core function of institutions, many newspaper articles also highlighted love and caring from an institution in their coverage of vagrancy issues. Whereas previously, the institution was portrayed as a dungeon or cage ("jaehwaljido dwaeya," 1987), the media described it as a social service facility where "vagrants were cared for with love and guided to the right path" ("tteodoneun sam," 1987) after the exposé of the Brothers Welfare Institution. The news media patronized vagrants also as parents, brothers and children ("jaehwaljido dwaeya," 1987; "tteodoneun sam," 1987). One news article quoted the director of a Catholic vagrant institution in Seoul emphasizing that staff did not manage vagrants but simply lived together with them. The article suggested that this institution modeled a possible solution to the problems exposed in the Brothers Welfare Institution and the Holy Land Institution (Yoonsuk Park, 1987). However, the same Catholic institution paternalized the inmates as objects of control. For instance, the article reported that inmates needed approval to go outside and were not allowed to manage their own paychecks, with no suggestion that these violations of inmates' rights were problematic (Yoonsuk Park, 1987). The director explained why she opposed giving paychecks directly to vagrants, telling the story of an inmate who had received all of his money from the institution by the time he was released. When he was later arrested again police found that all his money was gone (Yoonsuk Park, 1987). This justified labeling people as vagrants and keeping them under institutional control instead of recognizing their right to control the money they had earned from their labor in the institution. This paternalistic approach was coupled with the rehabilitation discourse to justify forced institutionalization.
Most newspaper articles showed some self-reflection in acknowledging that they had not adequately responded to people's suffering, terrible residential conditions, and corruption in institutions. However, the news media still did not question the rationale underlying the practice of arresting citizens from the street and keeping them confined, nor did they dispute the legitimacy of forced institutionalization. By leaving those practices unchallenged, they hid the fact that the Korean government violated its constitution, 4 which defines its duty to protect citizens' fundamental human rights such as personal liberty and the freedom of residence (S. Korea Hunbeob). Through different discourses, including objectification, criminalization, rehabilitation, and paternalism, the media stories did not focus on the system but on individuals. The media criticized a vagrant or a corrupt staff member rather than interrogate the system itself wherein a person was constructed as an object, criminal, or abnormal body. As a result, the media discourse indirectly justified forced institutionalization and vagrants' bodies remained as an object of control and regulation in the 1980s.
I have shared three discourses regarding vagrants: as unsightly objects, threatening figures, and targets for rehabilitation. Here I will investigate the relationship between these discourses and the technology of power governing the body, as well as the impact of disability discourses on vagrancy and institutionalization issues. ("burangin daechaegeomna," 1988; "jaehwaljido dwaeya," 1987). I also show how media discourses from the 1980s sheds light on today's deinstitutionalization movement in South Korea.
Without ignoring the unique experiences of individuals with disabilities, there are commonalities between their histories of oppression and forced institutionalization and those of other marginalized groups such as vagrants. This similarity was recognized by Jong-sun Han, one of the victim survivors from the Brothers Welfare Institution. He reported that it took a long time for him to recognize his abuse as a human rights violation. He thought it was his fault he had suffered abuse, until he learned about sexual violence crimes in the In-Hwa Residential School for Deaf Students (Han et al., 2012). Both crimes took place in institutions where residents lived cut off from their wider community for a considerable period of time, with restrictions on their self-determination (Kwak, 2019).
This was not a mere coincidence; the Fifth regime in the 1980s defined both vagrants and people with disabilities as objects to discipline and institutionalize (Jeon, 2021). As the State institutionalized vagrants in the 1980s, the number of institutions for people with disabilities also increased from twenty-five to eighty-two between 1973 and 1983 (E. Kim, 2017). Both vagrants and people with disabilities found themselves labeled as deviants and were targets for normalization. During this process, the state funded and engaged in institutionalization (J. Park, 2022). Framing vagrants as threats to the general public, then controlling them and subjecting them to inhumane treatment, the state used this chian [public safety] practice as a power reproduction mechanism (S. Jung, 2018).
South Korea endured two dictatorships and a military regime from 1961 to 1987 but nevertheless made steady progress toward democratization. However, the vagrancy discourse reveals how the state in those years adopted more delicate and sophisticated ruling mechanisms. Jeon (2021) describes the twentieth century in South Korea as "[a monstrous time]" for vagrants and people with disabilities—a time of legal confinement and no freedom—while to the majority of Koreans it was a period of democratization and liberation. The crimes of the Brothers Welfare Foundation have been replicated in several other institutions for people with disabilities since the 1980s (Jeon, 2021). The forced institutionalization of vagrants was a practice of biopolitical racism (Jeong, 2019; Soyoung Lee, 2016). The Republic of Korea is among the most racially and ethnically homogeneous countries, second only to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). Biosocial racism oppresses not only people of different races or ethnicities but also people within a single racial or ethnical group. Soyoung Lee (2016) explains how the Korean government implemented a biopolitical disciplinary technology from the 1960s to the 1980s by confining vagrants with a rationale of protecting the wholesome body of Korean society from those deemed enemies.
Extending Lee's argument, Jeong (2019) points out that the South Korean state not only labeled people as vagrants and portrayed them as a threat, but intentionally left them to die in institutions under the guise of "purifying" the body of Korean society (Jeong, 2019). I have argued that this biopolitical racism—removing the weak to save and strengthen the nation (Korea)—was not new in the 1980s but had been in operation since the late nineteenth century as a strategy for national survival. For example, Korean newspapers in the early 1900s utilized disability metaphors to help establish the New Korea against Japanese colonization (E. Jung, 2022). In particular, they used the metaphor of blindness to describe Korea's antagonists, and constructed people with disabilities as "illegitimate" citizens who needed to be excluded from the New Korea (E. Jung, 2022), This is echoed in the rhetoric of biopolitics against vagrants.
It is critical to understand why and how the state and the major media presented rehabilitation programs in this exclusionary discourse in the context of economic and political development in South Korea. S. Jung (2018) points out that the state had alliances with private welfare facilities during the 1970s' institutionalization of vagrants. Institutionalization not only reinforced the idea of rehabilitating bodies to fit the modern Korea, but it also supplied inmates for national construction projects. In that capacity, they were praised as "industrial warriors," (Soyoung Lee, 2016; A. Kim, 2011) but were in fact forced laborers. The rehabilitation discourse in the 1980s echoed the curative violence (E. Kim, 2017) against people with disabilities during Korea's colonial time, "justify[ing] everyday violence against [vagrants] as beneficial and necessary" and "[making] it difficult to acknowledge that [state] violence as violence" (E. Kim, 2017, p.232).
As demonstrated in this study, the news media showed support for confinement as a means of rehabilitation rather than advocate for their fellow Koreans. H. Park (2019) argues that forced institutionalization and daily violence against people labeled as vagrants was possible because both the state and civil activist groups shared the same perspective. Both were looking for causes of social problems in the traits and behaviors of individuals rather than as a structural issue of a nation undergoing rapid industrialization. After all, vagrants—not institutions—remained a problem for both the government and civil activists (Han et al., 2012). Civil activists did not consider people labeled as vagrants to be allies with whom to collaborate to protect their rights. Rather, they saw them as objects of pity (H. Park, 2019).
I would add to H. Park's argument that ableism may have stopped the media and civil activists from recognizing the violence of confinement. During the 1980s the Korean government, police, and institutions categorized vagrants according to their disability status. This determined nondisabled ones would be released back into public life and disabled ones still needed to stay in an institution. It is worth noting that in 1989, three quarters of all residents in vagrant institutions had disabilities. In vagrancy discourse, bodies that reinforced the dominant ideology of independence after rehabilitation could return to society, while those that could not be fixed remained institutionalized. In reality, however, the promise of returning inmates deemed as rehabilitable was never kept either (Kwak, 2019). Because the Korean government and media constructed the image of people labeled as vagrants as abnormal and socially inadequate, it was easier for the media to ignore or justify institutionalized violence against them. Disability became a barometer for categorizing normal and abnormal Koreans.
How was the Korean government able to confine citizens in violation of the Korean constitution? Freidman (2019) shows quantitively that in the context of the United States, the more prejudice people have, the more institutionalization has occurred. This explains how ableism works implicitly in the process whereby people with disabilities are institutionalized. In a pattern reminiscent of Friedman's findings, the Korean government may have been able to take advantage of the absence of solidarity among citizens because of pervasive ableism among the public. And once vagrants were categorized as misfits and abnormal, the only solution the media and government offered was isolation. To this day, involuntary institutionalization remains a topic of intense debate, and forced labor by people with disabilities continues, albeit hidden from public view. The vagrancy and disability discourses and the state policies have begun changing in the twenty-first century in South Korea, but not in the direction of breaking down the normality discourse and of deinstitutionalization.
Survivors from the Brothers Welfare Institution are still engaged in "the politics of waiting" (Joo, 2018) while Korean society remains indifferent to the crimes against citizens by institutions and the state. Survivors of forced institutionalization testify that they still experience mental anguish from social exclusion (Yu, 2018). Korean society still does not recognize survivors' pain as a social issue but frames it as an individual problem, making it more difficult for them to recover (Yu, 2018). In addition, Korean society continues to practice social exclusion by categorizing people in groups such as vagrant or disabled.
The persistence of dealing with homelessness by labeling and separating vagrants is exemplified by Korean discourses during and after the Asian Debt Crisis (a.k.a. the IMF era, 1997-2001). Song (2009) analyzes how the Korean government and civil society dichotomized the deserving and the undeserving poor during the debt crisis and supported only those deemed employable with a temporary circumstance of homelessness. She also explains two Korean homeless policies enacted during the IMF era. The first was to protect "normal citizens from potentially violent homeless people" (Song, p.193). The second policy was for "promot[ing] the benevolent image of a welfare state for protecting homeless people through a demarcation of short-term street living people—as "deserving" homeless citizens—from long-term street living people" (p. 193). Koreans continue to debate the value of categorizing people according to whether or not they are worthy of government support and residential rights.
Amid the struggle to change discourses toward the deinstitutionalization for all, I suggest a greater focus on analyzing the power mechanism behind institutionalization practices against various groups of people in different times in Koren history. Unless Koreans come to understand what enabled institutionalization to happen in the past, they will remain unable to stop the regulation of bodies perceived as deviant. To stop institutionalization against various minority groups it is important to identify oppressive discursive practices, particularly those driven by ableism. The Korean media in 1980s supported the state violence of institutionalization by circulating oppressive vagrant discourses that resembled disability discourses. A critical awareness of ableism may enable Korean citizens to read other media discourses critically and to resist participation in excluding groups of people. In this vein, this article has analyzed how the state criminalized vagrants and forced them into institutions with the approval of the media. This technique of criminalization—of equating a certain minority group to potential criminals—is often used not only against people with disabilities or individuals experiencing homelessness. It also commonly undergirds oppressive practices against young people, in particular male youth of color in the U.S. context.
This modern history of Korea also raises the topic of spaces where various groups of people negotiate power relations. J. Kim (2010) suggests a transformation of Seoul's main train station from a space of control to a space of differences, particularly around people with homelessness. In order to prevent the expansion and misuse of state power against minority groups, it is critical to monitor public spaces such as train stations, streets, bus stops, squares or plazas, etc., to carefully observe how and by whom these spaces are used.
Finally, disability and homelessness can be used to interrogate ideologies that are often perceived and practiced without a critical lens (Schweik, 2009). Both issues call attention to the dominant social understanding of care, disability, independence, citizenship, access to public spaces, freedom, civil or human rights, development, deservedness, labor, etc. Korean society easily became a conspirator in crimes against people labeled as vagrants because of the implicit belief that people who overlooked their sacred labor duties were not legitimate citizens deserving the right of freedom (Han et al., 2012). The Western concept of human rights provided marginalized groups in South Korea a tool to resist state violence and discrimination throughout society. However, as seen in the vagrant discourse, that Western ethos was also used as a rationale to confine and remove people deemed unfit for a modernized and developed society. The practice of excluding people of minority backgrounds can persist even after the national policy of "eliminating" vagrants from the public space has been reversed, unless dominant views about universal human rights change as well.
Similarly, eliminating pervasive ableism among the public is an essential step toward lasting change, whether it takes place before or after changes in law and policy. To resist oppressive discourses against any members of a society, the public needs to know how the media discourse increases and reinforces power structures. This self-awareness may help halt the recurrence of media discourses that work similarly against a variety of minority groups. As demonstrated by the discourses analyzed in this study, although the Western concept of human rights bolstered Korea's development as a modern society, those rights were not applied equally to all citizens. As soon as they failed to meet the dominant ideal of productive members of the society, their right to be free from forced institutionalization and labor was dismissed, and the mistreatment that led many to their deaths was set in motion. The interaction between human rights, disabilities, ideal people in an ideal nation, and biopolitics in the compressed modern history of Korea require further exploration.
This work was supported by a Research and Creative Grant at Syracuse University.