A Legislative Review on the Prohibition and Prevention of Sexual Harassment
Authors:   Korean Public Land Law Association, Seon Eun-Ae 
Published: September 2023

In accordance with Article 3 in 「Fundamental Law on Equality between Women and Men」, “sexual harassment” implies an act of causing the other party to feel sexual humiliation or disgust by sexual behavior or sexual demands, etc. and an act of penalizing the other person for not complying with sexual behavior or sexual demands or of expressing one’s intention to give a profit on condition of compliance in relation to one's position or work, etc. by the employee, employer, or worker of a state agency, a local government, or a public organization prescribed by the Presidential Decree, in terms of work, employment, and other relations.
To prevent sexual abuse, the employer shall set conditions so that employees can work under the safe and peaceful working conditions. The employers of all workplaces with one or more full-time workers must carry out the education on the prevention of sexual harassment in the workplace, which is a statutory compulsory education, more than once a year targeting all employees.
Despite the legislation of the preventive education in this way, it is the real situation of being difficult to be easily saved in light of social structure given the issue of sexual abuse that occurred in non-regular workers or temporary workers and dispatched workers.
Especially, a yardstick for judging sexual harassment in the event of a sexual abuse case is not clear, thereby causing confusion in applying this. The punishment for sexual harassment is consistently facing the lukewarm attitude such as disciplinary action or separation from the victim within the organization to which the assailant belongs, not mostly criminal charges, thereby having a problem dubbed not the direct relief for victims through criminal penalty.
To prevent this sexual harassment, the application of the law should be embodied by unifying a law on sexual harassment, which is stipulated now in 「Gender Equality Law」, 「Act on Equal Employment and Support for Work- Family Reconciliation」, 「National Human Right Committee Act」, and by clarifying the criteria for judging sexual harassment. Also, even with regard to the relief step for sexual harassment, there is a need to ensure the expertise in sexual harassment relief through the centralization rather than the decentralization of the responsible department. There will be a need to develop and expand the Integrated Education Services aiming at boosting the expertise of complaint handling professionals and at preventing sexual abuse.
And to secure the effectiveness of sexual-harassment prevention education that is legal compulsory education, the execution of the tailored education in line with subjects’ characteristics along with the development in diverse education programs will lead not only to being possibly uprooted the problem of sexual harassment in our society but also to preventing sexual abuse and relieving victims. Thus, it will result in being capable of realizing the national welfare promotion as well as in what these victims lead a life worthy of human dignity.