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Teachers say schoolyard gangs are organizing themselves into a nationwide network of violent youngsters who protect their patch through violence and intimidation.
At a school violence prevention workshop by the National Police Agency on Wednesday, a teacher from a middle school in Seoul warned that the gangs - known as Iljinhoe or hooligans - were growing and targeting younger and younger students.
"If you know the Iljinhoe, you can reduce school violence by nine tenths," was the slogan of the presentation by the teacher, who gave his name as Chung. He said the Iljinhoe were gradually developing into an organization linking kindred gangs in different schools.
Chung said Iljinhoe were setting up local, regional and national alliances. The spread of the Internet now allowed students to build online communities, where individual grades within middle and high schools were forming national gang alliances, he said. The biggest problem with the gangs' expansion was that even if victims of school violence or bullying move to a different school, the gangs' inter-school connections ensure that they do not escape their grasp, he added.
A Seoul alliance of Iljinhoe recently organized a gathering at a local rock cafe involving about 1,000 students, during which members engaged in a public sex act known as the "sex machine." The gangs spread a culture where violence is regarded as fun, with the "beating game" and "bullying game" overshadowed by crueler versions like the "strangling game," in which gang members strangle a student until he or she passes out, or the "rape game."
Another serious problem is that school violence seems to be getting younger, with little Iljinhoe now found even in elementary schools. Chung said one middle school girl he counseled said she fell in with gang members when she was in the sixth grade of elementary school, and from that time she was made to smoke and steal money from other students, which she turned over to senior gang members as a kind of tax.
Chung said schools, worried about their reputations, tended to hush up problems involving gang violence, but he warned it was time to realize the seriousness of the issue and tackle the problem head-on through cooperation between schools.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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