"The Glory" of High School Bullying

The bullying of students … in K-dramas

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Moon Dong-eun (played by Song Hye-kyo)
Ju Yeo-jeong (played by Lee Do-hyun)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

As with the first half of The Glory, the final eight episodes of this revenge series center on a thirtysomething teacher who suffered from severe bullying in high school. Actually, bullied is too gentle of a word to describe what was done to Dong-eun by a group of sadistic and cool rich kids. The girls branded her daily with a hot curling iron, while the boys beat and sexually abused her. And no one dared to stop them — not their parents, teachers, or police. All the adults in the series wrote off these criminal attacks as merely school friends doing a bit of harmless roughhousing.

The past 14 months have seen the release of quite a few Korean teen-centric revenge shows — All of Us Are Dead, Juvenile Justice, Revenge of Others, and Weak Hero Class 1 — that have tackled bullying.

“The reality of what kids go through in Korean schools is probably stranger and harsher than anything displayed in dramas,” said Joy Lieberthal Rho, LCSW, who grew up in South Korea before being adopted by parents in the United States. “So [while] the fiction may be outrageous, the intention is 100% reality.”

Rho continued, “Bullying is insane in Korea — I have friends who decided not to return to Korea with their American-born children because they didn’t want their kids to be bullied. I think about the kids who were in my orphanage and how numb and depressed they were being in school — lunch time being particularly brutal, since [their free] lunches revealed who they were and where they lived. I saw the way the girls in particular tried their very best to just blend in so they wouldn't be targeted.”

But what about South Korea’s hyper-competitive educational system, which adds additional pressure on students to metaphorically beat each other every day?

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