'Love Catcher' Kim Ji-yeon revealed her experience as a victim of school violence.
On the 1st, a video titled "Why I experienced school violence & and dropped out of Hanyang University?" was uploaded to the 'Harujiyun' YouTube channel.
That day Kim Ji-yeon said, "My long history of being ostracized, the tales of school violence I suffered. I'll just tell a few of the stories I remember that were strangely memorable. Rather than wanting to tell sad and painful stories, it's more like the tale of getting stronger after surviving," she began.
She said her first ostracism happened in the first year of middle school and said, "There were twins at our girls' middle school and both were mean. One of them was in the same class as me in first year. She would lead a clique. In that group they would ostracize one person at a time. I spent three years like that. I don't know what I did wrong. They did it for fun so there was no reason. I lived like on and off being ostracized," she confessed.
She also said she was ostracized again in town for supposedly looking at men while walking. Kim Ji-yeon said, "I was just looking so I wouldn't bump into someone when a person walked by, and since I have eyes shouldn't I look ahead? So I looked, but anyway that was the reason. It was unfair, and I decided not to give them any reason at all, so from then on I kept my eyes down. Wherever I went. It became a habit and I didn't fix it until I became an adult. One of the habits that remains is mainly walking with my eyes on the ground or, these days it's better so I look at the tips of my shoes — anyway I try not to look at people's faces when I walk," she said of the aftereffects.
The school violence continued into high school. She, who ended up in the same class as one of the problematic twins, recalled, "In April or May I developed facial paralysis and was hospitalized for a week. When I came to school, a friend who had been close to me treated me like an invisible person. Not only that friend, but about 15 girls in our class almost all treated me like an invisible person. I was so used to it I thought I was being ostracized again, so I went to my seat, put in my earphones and used my phone. That was the beginning of the semester. I attended for two months and it was ostracism. Nothing had happened before that. The boys in our class all knew about it. Because the boys were nice they said, 'Why aren't the kids acknowledging you?' and I said, 'I don't know, maybe I did something wrong.' As that passed, some girls saw it. That girl ran off and said, 'Kim Ji-yeon was acting pitiful in front of the boys.' The matter escalated. I stayed quiet but the boys and girls in my class started fighting," she recalled the situation.
The homeroom teacher who learned of the matter suggested holding a school violence disciplinary committee, but Kim Ji-yeon said, "At that time articles appeared in the news starting from Sungkyunkwan University saying they would not accept anyone with a school violence record. Seeing that, I thought, 'A couple of people led it and the others may have joined to avoid being excluded from the group. If we only punish the one or two leaders, it's not fair to the rest who had no choice. I don't want to block the futures of friends who made one mistake,'" she said.
She said, "A few days later I was invited to a group chat. I thought it was a new form of bullying but fortunately they didn't harass me further and there wasn't really an apology. It was like, 'Why aren't you hanging out with us these days?' — framing it as if it wasn't their fault but that I wasn't hanging out with them," and added, "It turned out that after I was hospitalized one of the twin girls who had bullied me since middle school made a group chat excluding those she thought wouldn't follow her and said, 'Let's talk about people we dislike.' The other girls said there was no one they disliked at the start of the semester, so she said, 'I dislike Kim Ji-yeon. She acts coy and flirts with boys.' Of the about 10 who joined that, around five came to apologize to me. After that some of them treated me well," she said, indicating the situation ended without further incident.
In particular, on the reason she dropped out of Hanyang University's dance department, Kim Ji-yeon said, "I loved dance and wanted to be an artist. The art I aspired to has no right answer and I wanted an art that immediately evoked something unique to Kim Ji-yeon. Once I entered university, they stripped all that away and made us do everything exactly as told. The teachers' lines, whose disciples you were — that was too intense, and in my grade I was the only student from an academic high school while the rest were from arts high schools with senior-junior relationships so there was a lot of looking after each other. It wasn't the education I had imagined, and I had a reality check. I hadn't come to dance here to do it like my life depended on it. I thought maybe I didn't have to go to university," she said, adding, "The instructors were too harsh, the seniors were too harsh, and my classmates were too harsh. From my common-sense viewpoint it was incomprehensible," she said.
She said she was bullied and ostracized in university for reasons such as being in a romantic relationship, and recalled, "It got worse and when I tried to talk to someone they would say things like, 'What's wrong with her?' which was so hard. I felt I wasn't being respected as a person, so I wondered if I had to endure this even in university. I had many reality checks and I was living alone in Seoul so I had no one to rely on. I couldn't even tell my mother. Why do I have to go this far? I wasn't attending because I wanted to, so I was very upset. How hard must that twenty-year-old me have been? After class I called my mother crying and said, 'I can't keep going. I tried my best. I want to drop out,'" she recalled her feelings.
She said, "My school life was so hard that it caused panic attacks and severe depression. One day I was sleeping and dreamed someone wearing a black hat and black clothes power-walking from our front door into the bedroom where I was sleeping. I woke up terrified with a scream. That dream is still scary. I felt like I was going to die. I had a sense of danger. Just thinking about school makes my heart race and I can't breathe, and from then on panic attacks would come occasionally and they still do. So as soon as I reached my fourth year I took a three-year leave of absence. After three years of working in society I earned money and when I reentered the dance department I felt like a frog in a well. Why had I tried so hard to be in the professors' favor and trembled before insignificant seniors, why had I tolerated unfairness? All of that was broken," she said, revealing she ultimately decided to drop out.
She continued, "I felt nothing had changed, so I said I would drop out. They said I couldn't. But I didn't want a diploma and my work didn't require one, and it mattered more that I had lived diligently enough to enter this school, so I disappeared. I ignored all contact from the professors and dropped out. University life gave me tremendous aftereffects and lessons. Having survived all that, the easiest thing for me became earning money and working in society. Once I was out in the world, no one treated me as badly, and none of the people who ostracized me were there, and everyone treated me kindly. The hardest thing was group life. Young 20-year-old Kim Ji-yeon endured and came this far, and I'm not going to let myself be defeated by this now that I'm not twenty. I thought, let's see who wins, and I endured this life. Getting stronger isn't all good, is it? Anyway, I lived roughly. That's why the present Kim Ji-yeon exists," she said.
Meanwhile, Kim Ji-yeon became pregnant before marriage by baseball player Jeong Cheol-won in 2024, gave birth to a son, registered the marriage and held a wedding ceremony last December. But a month later she announced news of a divorce, and a lawsuit is currently ongoing.
[Photo] Harujiyun
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