2022-09-16 00:05
Public awareness of autism and developmental disabilities in South Korea has grown since the hit drama ‘Extraordinary Attorney Woo,’ but advocacy groups warn that attention alone cannot prevent recurring tragedies in families caring for people with developmental disabilities. Kim Ye-won, founder and lead attorney of the Disability Rights Law Center, says fatal incidents continue to happen monthly despite increased visibility, and that structural problems—particularly chronic underfunding—are the root cause.
Kim, a visually impaired lawyer who has worked in public-interest law for over a decade and runs a pro bono practice handling 50–100 cases at a time, was recently named a Kakao Impact Fellow and is currently a visiting scholar at Duke University. She uses fellowship support to sustain legal aid and plans regional collaborations to help vulnerable urban populations. Kim emphasizes she selects cases she can meaningfully support—often representing people who cannot pay—and rejects comparisons to dramatized portrayals despite the media attention.
The policy gap is stark: the 2023 Ministry of Health and Welfare budget allocates only 4.8 billion KRW for deinstitutionalization out of roughly 2.2 trillion KRW classed as disability rights spending, and Korea’s disability welfare budget equals just 0.61% of GDP versus the OECD average of 2.02%. Kim calls for significantly increased funding and staffing for community-based supports and ‘deinstitutionalization,’ and continues advocacy work including successful legal reforms (e.g., 2016 changes allowing visually impaired applicants to sit certain driving tests) and current research at Duke on victim support systems for hard-to-detect, power-based crimes like child abuse and intimate-partner sexual violence.
Original source: “장애인에 관심 커졌지만 예산지원 아직 멀어” (Source: the news outlet; please refer to the original article.)
