'Your butt is this big!' Teachers in Ulsan suffer regular sexual harassment by students.

A classroom in Gwangju. Unrelated to the story. [YONHAP]

In March, a sixth-grade teacher in Ulsan was stunned when one of her students placed a bottle of hand sanitizer in front of his crotch and squired the liquid onto the floor, saying, "As a man, naturally, I should be hard."

Snickering, he added, "Just like this, right?"

The student also made strange noises during class.

The teacher later had to be treated for anxiety disorder and depression.

A foreign teacher was humiliated when her students at an elementary school in Ulsan taunted her by putting two balloons together and joking, "That's how big your behind is."

The sixth graders kept talking about her posterior even after class began.

“These were just a few of the sexual harassment cases reported in Ulsan's schools,” said somebody from the Ulsan teachers’ union.

“Students at a middle school students shook their butts in front of a teacher, and students in a high school drew an image of a woman’s body part on the electronic whiteboard while a female teacher was teaching the Korean class.”

According to a study by the Ulsan Public Agency for Welfare Family Protection Social Service on Tuesday, half of the teachers who experienced sexual harassment were victimized by students, mainly in the classroom.

Of the 2,103 Ulsan educators surveyed, 6.3 percent - or 133 teachers - said they'd been sexually harassed in the last three years.

Some 1,504 female educators and 599 male educators took part in the survey.


The harassment most often took the form of comments about the teachers' looks or sexually degrading remarks at 73.7 percent, followed by staring at certain body parts at 33.8 percent and sexual jokes at 25.6 percent. Survey participants could choose multiple answers.

Some 31.4 percent of the victims immediately asked the offenders to stop, while 28.4 percent did nothing, and 27 percent just laughed the harassment off out of embarrassment.

The Ulsan Public Agency for Welfare Family Protection Social Service also found that more teachers in Ulsan are retiring early, though their reasons for doing so are unclear.

A total of 208 teachers applied for early retirement between February and August, nearly double the total from the same period last year.

A decade ago, only 100 or so teachers retired early.

Teachers at public high schools and middle schools accounted for 106 of the early retirement applicants, followed by 70 elementary school teachers and 31 teachers at private middle and high schools.


Teachers in their 50s accounted for more than half of the applicants.

“Violation of teachers’ rights, including sexual harassment, appears to be affecting early retirement,” the Ulsan Metropolitan Office of Education said.

BY LEE HO-JEONG [lee.hojeong@joongang.co.kr]