The following research is an analysis on the Women’s Safety Initiative during the last seven years, centered on the Safe Trip Home for Women service in Seoul. The research explores what methods such policies take to define subjects and providers of ...
The following research is an analysis on the Women’s Safety Initiative during the last seven years, centered on the Safe Trip Home for Women service in Seoul. The research explores what methods such policies take to define subjects and providers of protection, and how it reproduces the discourse of protectionism. Such discourse is created in the relationships between the users and the Safe Trip Home for Women Scouts when the service is available from weekdays 10pm to 1am. This research investigates how the Scouts and the users are set as the provider and the subject of protection and how they fall into the circumstances thereof.
From 2008 onwards, there has been a great demand for Women’s Safety Initiative within the Korean society regarding policymaking. The Women’s Safety Initiative in Seoul was also carried out in this context. The policies were planned and executed with the idea of women being the “the vulnerable”. Among these policies, the Safe Trip Home for Women service is a system where the Seoul city government hires “scouts” to deal with the safety issues that women are subject to on their way home at night.
The Safe Trip Home for Women scouts consist of female scouts and male scouts. The female scouts are jobs created as a result of both the Women’s Safety Initiative and the Women’s Public Jobs Policy. The Seoul city government suggested that the 70% of scouts for the Safe Trip Home for Women service should be female, as well as being a local resident familiar with the local geography. Therefore, most of the scouts hired were middle-aged women in their 40s or 50s. The female scouts’ roles were primarily planned to cover conversations or emotional aspects, whereas the male scouts covered safety aspects for both the user and the female scout. Based on this system, a team of two female scouts and one male scout escorted the user during their trip home.
The reality of the implementation of this service reveals itself by the change in the gender ratio of scouts. The ratio of female scouts increases every year compared to their male counterparts. The reason for this is the complaints filed by the users against the male scouts. The complaints usually discuss displeasure and discomfort that users feel towards the male scouts. Moreover, these issues are not only raised by the users, but also the female scouts who work with the male scouts as a team. This leads to an ironic situation where the male scouts, designed to ensure the user and the female scout’s safety, is regarded as a potential threat. Seven years from its first implementation, male scouts have become something that district governments are reluctant to hire, unlike when the service first became available.
In the implementation of The Safe Trip Home for Women service, the female scouts are seen as the victim, whereas the male scouts become potential threats. The safety issues of the female scouts on their way home, an issue which has risen from 2014 in the media and complaint channels, discuss female scouts as another woman in need of protection. This indicates that the condition of being “the vulnerable” in the Measure for Women’s Safety limits itself as an issue of gender. The irony of the situation is that the female scouts are providers of protection for the female users, but they are also seen as in need of protection because they are female.
This research seeks to discuss how the Safe Trip Home for Women service, as a part of the Women’s Safety Initiative, enforces binary gender in the field during its seven years of implementation. This binary ideology of “Women in need of protection” and “Men providing protection” is reinforced in the implementation of this service. Being a woman is translated as being a subject of protection and is discussed only in the context of potential victims. The objective of this research is to shed light onto the irony of deciding who requires protection using gender as the standard by looking at how the Women’s Safety Initiative is implemented in the field, to expose that binary gender division is a subject of certain discourses and policies, and to provide arguments to critically respond to these phenomena.