How Many Teenage Girls Are Smoking?
(Source)
If you’ve been following my The Gender Politics of Smoking in South Korea series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Newsflash, Part 4, Korea’s Hidden Smokers), you’ll know that there’s a huge stigma against women smoking here. This leads to chronic under-reporting by female smokers, which in turn leads to the government and media regularly giving female smoking rates as low as 2-4%. In reality though, best estimates put the rate amongst young women at roughly 20%, pointing to a looming health crisis.
Even if the coming presidential election brings more enlightened officials to the Ministry of Health and Welfare (보건복지부) however, which has previously overwhelmingly focused on — and been accused of exaggerating — reductions in the male smoking rate, there’ll still remain the problem of finding out how many young Korean women actually smoke.
Or will there? With my thanks, let me pass on a reader’s partial solution:
My coworker, the assistant haksaengbu (학생부) at my high school, made a list of students caught smoking. This is at a small-town girls high school, with 330 students age 15-18 in western years. So far this year (since 2 March) 14% of the students have been caught smoking, with 9.5% of the academic (moongwha; 문과) students caught and 25% of the vocational (sanggwha; 상과) students caught.
I would think that 14% would be the absolute minimum possible average in Korea, considering that we’re in a fairly conservative area and teachers can still punish students (though it’s pretty inconsistent and haphazard). Considering that those are only the ones who’ve been caught and there’s almost nothing in the way of lunchtime and after-school supervision, I’d guess that the amount who smoke on a daily basis is 50% higher and the ones who’ve tried it on occasion is double that.
In any event, if you wanted some incontrovertible statistics about teenage girls smoking in rural Korea based on a sample size in the hundreds there you go!
Later, they added:
If you’d like the breakdown it was 21 out of 226 moonghwa students and 26 out of 106 sangwha students. I believe a couple of the sangwha students have dropped out/gone awol/transferred.
What do you think? How does this compare to readers’ own schools?
Korean Gender Reader
(Source)
Sorry for the slow posting everyone: alas, I’m so busy with all my offline projects these days that my planned posting schedule for 2012 is already proving unsustainable. But in the meantime, the news stories just keep coming!
• T-ara members sleep for 2 hours a day (Frank Kogan; see Seoulbeats also)
• Convicted rapist successfully uses the ‘crooked dick’ defense (The Marmot’s Hole; update)
• Korea divorce checklist for negotiation of a marital separation agreement in Korea (The Korea Law Blog)
• Parents tremble at ‘pleasure parties’ thrown by foreign instructors (Gusts of Popular Feeling)
• Travel in Korea still lacks women’s bathrooms (Travelwire Asia)
• 쓰레기 같은 학생, or, Why you might need pepperspray (Gord Sellar)
• Hair freedom for Seoul students (Hankyoreh)
• Internet hot over ‘bikini protest’ (Korea Times) vs. Gong Ji-young (“The Crucible”) Bikinis, Breasts and Weasels (Korean Modern Literature in Translation)
• Fat tax elicits mixed reactions from S. Korean public (Xinhuanet)
• Survey finds lots of sexual harassment at South Korean workplaces (Asian Correspondent)
• Korean women and western/white men: a complicated and troubled relationship (The Unlikely Expat)
• Women leading Korea (The Peninsula) vs. Lone Star and the women of Korea (The Wall Street Journal: Business Asia)
• Jeju Island, known for wind, women, and water…now has more men than women (The Wall Street Journal: Korea Realtime)
• My final post on Asian/white interracial relationships (Shanghai Shiok!)
• Brides-to-be being ripped off ahead of their big day (Hankyoreh)
• “[Is] dating a 28 year-old guy in Korea like dating a 15 year-old in the US?” Deconstructing inane and offensive reader questions (I’m No Picasso)
• An update to the above story – the question wasn’t as bad as it first looked!
• Ministry strives for women’s rights (The Korea Herald)
• South Korea’s racism debate – What debate? (Gord Sellar)
• Headline of the week: “Hard competition coming for erectile dysfunction remedies” (Hankyoreh)
• Entertainment agency representatives voice opinions on idol dating, marriages, and age-limits on usefulness (Allkpop)
• More elderly people sue their children for support (The Chosunilbo)
(Links are not necessarily endorsements)
Korean Gender Reader
(Source: Joseph Senior, via Visual News)
Just some quick links this week sorry, I’m very busy working on what feels like a dozen blog posts and offline articles at the moment!
• Recent controversial events in K-pop (My First Love Story)
• WTF Moment: Teen Top’s C.A.P and his jokes about domestic violence (Seoulbeats; see Feminoonas for updates)
• Iron Butterfly: memoir of a female Kuk Sool Won master (BBC News)
• Gay in Korea: foreign female perspective and foreign male perspective (Expatkerri)
• Sejong move splits families, hits female civil servants’ marriage prospects (Korea Joongang Daily)
• Portion of unmarried 30-something men growing, becoming social problem (Hankyoreh)
• Number of elementary school students in Seoul falls 30% in 10 years (Korea Times, via Gusts of Popular Feeling; see The Marmot’s Hole also for more on Korean demographics)
• Unemployed middle-aged men ostracized by their families (Chosunilbo)
• “In 2010, only 8.7% of working mothers in South Korea took maternity leave” (Hankyoreh)
• The importance of women for the future of Korea (Korea: Circles and Squares. And after reading that, make sure to check out this revealing photo too!)
(Links are not necessarily endorsements)
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