At an appeals court in the southwestern city of Gwangju in 2006, a school official was convicted of raping a 13-year-old deaf girl and sentenced to one year in prison. When the verdict came, an outraged middle-aged man, also deaf, let out an incomprehensible cry from the galley, signaling frantically with sign language. Chung Yoo-mi portrayed the human rights activist Seo Yoo-jin in a courtroom scene from the movie “The Crucible.” It was clear that the man was shouting, ‘This is wrong! This is wrong!”’ Lee Ji-won, a newspaper intern, wrote in her blog later that day under the subject line, “I saw the foul underside of our society.”
The man was forcibly removed for disrupting the courtroom. And that might have been the end of it. Except that the intern’s blog inspired a best-selling author, Gong Ji-young, to write a novel based on the sexual assaults at the Inhwa School for the hearing impaired, the school’s attempts to conceal the abuses and the victims’ struggle for justice. Now, a film based on that novel — “Dogani,” or “The Crucible” — has roiled South Korea. Since its release on Sept. 22, 4.4 million people, including President Lee Myung-bak — nearly a 10th of the country’s population — have seen it. The film has tapped into widespread anger over official reluctance to take sexual crimes seriously, and over how justice is served, or not, in South Korea. The cabinet has vowed to inspect all facilities for the disabled and minors to ferret out teachers with records of sexual abuse. The head of the Supreme Court admitted that “society is simmering with resentment” toward a legal system long criticized as “yujeonmujoe mujeonnyujoe,” or “not guilty for the rich, guilty for the poor.”
Lawmakers are pushing for tougher penalties for sexual crimes. The Education Ministry has said it will shut down Inhwa School. For a low-budget movie barred to people under 18, “The Crucible” has had an extraordinary impact. In a way, that reaction seems at odds with South Korean society. Here, disregard for the disabled is so entrenched that the subway authorities began installing elevators for wheelchair access only in recent years following protests by the handicapped in which they chained themselves to the tracks with signs that read, “We want to use the subway too.” “What people see in the movie is a capsule version of their society,” said Chun Sang-chin, a sociologist at Sogang University. “There is anger over how the strong bully the weak, despair over how the system protects the well-connected, and fear that the same can happen to the rest of us.”
Dogani Trailer
The movie Dogani should be translated into many different languages and shown throughout the world. This is an excellent movie with a very important story to tell. Children who are unable to communicate effectively or at all are usually the target of sexual predators. The main reason being that they are not held credible to interpretation. Deaf and hearing impaired children are often told by hearing individuals from early childhood that they misinterpreted a situation or miscommunicated/sent the wrong signals to an individual or received the wrong signals from an individual. That makes them very vulnerable to dishonest and abusive… Read more »