Kwon In-sook

Kwon In-sook (; born 1964) is a former South Korean labor organizer who inspired women in South Korea to form the Korean Women's Associations United (KWAU). Kwon is the first woman to bring charges of sexual assault against the South Korean government. She was also considered by historian Namhee Lee to be "an emblematic figure of South Korea in the 1980s; she embodied the passion, the ideals, and the conflicting aspirations of the 1980s democratization movement." She had been involved with student movements at the time, and said that "It was hard to swallow the betrayal and anger against adults to had fed lies to the young." She lied about her education in order to "organize factory workers into a trade union." In June 1986, she went to the police station in Puch'ŏn in order to address charges that she had falsified documents. She had also been charged for taking part in a "violent demonstration." Kwon was sexually abused at the police station by an officer, Mun Kwi-dong.

During press coverage of the case, the South Korean government micromanaged how the press would report what happened to Kwon, including guidelines that changed the tone of the case and which also cast Kwon as a liar and possibly a communist. The initial reporting of the story was a single line at the bottom of the social page in Korea Daily. A spokesman for the government called her allegations of sexual assault a "routine tactic used by student radicals."

Kwon was eventually imprisoned for eighteen months for falsifying identification documents. Criminal charges against Mun were dropped because while "the prosecution office said its investigation into Kwon's complaint found some truth" there was still not enough evidence for them to proceed with the trial. In addition, the prosecution claimed that while she had been beaten on the breasts while nude, the government did not "consider these acts sexual abuse." Kwon's case is considered an illustration of cover-ups regarding political neutrality of the South Korean judicial system in the mid-1980s.

Legacy The news that Kwon had sued regarding her sexual abuse would "rock Korean society for months. It was shocking that a young woman would go public with an accusation that was more likely to damage her own reputation than that of the accused." The acts of sexual abuse as described by Kwon led to the creation of the KWAU which would influence Korean politics in the 1990s.