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10 Hours of walking in Seoul as a Woman: How many times is a girl catcalled?

Posted by Pakman30 pts Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Back in late October, a video of a woman's sexual harassment experiment went viral. In the experiment, during ten hours of silent walking throughout the city of New York, the woman was catcalled over 100 times without even having to say a single word.

The video struck a chord with women all over the world who have experienced being harassed or followed while out in public. Media outlet JoongAng Ilbo recently decided to conduct their own similar experiment in Seoul, employing their New Media sector talent Lee Na Eun.

In the video shown above, Lee walks throughout the city of Seoul, specifically through the Garosu-gil and Itaewon areas. Only two incidents are shown in this report. While at the 0:50 mark, one non-Korean person follows Lee for a bit, asking, "Korean person? Pretty," and persisting with, "What's your name? My name is XX," in another instance shown at the 1:05 mark, another non-Korean is shown following Lee Na Eun for 30 minutes before approaching her and asking, "Wait. Would you drink coffee with me?"

JTBC News states that no Korean men approached Lee throughout the experiment. Lee Na Eun, however, shares that she also felt uncomfortable with a few of the Korean men, saying, "Although there was no one who thought to follow me, they, what do you call it, scanned me? I think there were many cases where they stared at me for 30-40 seconds."

According to JTBC News, although similar sexual harassment experiments have been conducted in countries such as Germany, Latvia, and India, almost no cases of sexual harassment occurred in those experiments.

The original New York City experiment video that inspired a chain of sexual harassment experiments is shown below.