0		English, teachers, overpaid,, oversexed, and, over, here

The English teacher seems to be overtaking the American soldier as the "white" devil of choice among the more xenophobic elements of Korean society.

Assemblyman Lee Gun-hyeon told the press recently that crimes committed by foreign English teachers are "at a serious level."  When pressed with the fact that the crime rate among foreign English teachers is in fact several times less than the rate among Koreans (see previous link), Lee's chief of staff sidestepped, saying, "There are various sorts of crimes. Especially, using drugs and committing sexual violations at schools are very serious compared to other simple crimes." OK.

Perhaps Lee is on to something. The anti-foreign English teacher Anti-English Spectrum (more on that name in a moment) has produced a chart noting that serious crimes among English teachers in Korea, uh.... decreased from 2007 to 2008 (Screen save brought to you by Guests of Popular Feeling). On the other hand the very serious charge of rape among foreign English teachers increased a mind-blowing 200%... from 2 to 6.

There has long been a certain level of resentment among Korean men of westerners coming in and taking "their women," but that ire had generally been directed towards the roughly 26,000 American soldiers in the country, leading in incidents like the 1995 subway brawl.

The change of focus towards English teachers took off with the English Spectrum incident in 2005 in which several photos of Korean women frolicking with western men in a nightclub in the Hongik district were posted in the 'Ask the Playboy' forum on the English Spectrum web page. The women involved also faced harassment.

There are real cases of English teachers committing sexual crimes (most famously Canadian Christopher Paul Neil, who had worked as an English teacher in Korea but committed his crimes in Southeast Asia) but those are incidents are not disproportionately common among foreign English teachers and are likely even less common than what is found among the native Korean population.