Two Perspectives on Perpetrators: Public Responses to Homicide Offenders Based on Victim Nationality

• In Event: Poster Session 2

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate public responses to the offender notification policy for criminals who committed homicide. This research captures that how public reactions change depending on the victim's ethnicity, despite the similarity in the cases. Data were collected from comments on news articles on NAVER, the largest online platform in South Korea. Comments were selected as the focus of the study because they provide unfiltered public opinion compared to news articles. Two similar murder cases with different victim’s nationalities: (1)a case involving a Korean perpetrator and a Korean victim, and (2)a case involving a Korean perpetrator and a Chinese victim. Result showed that public responses varied based on the victim's ethnicity. In cases involving Chinese victim, the public tended to empathize with the Korean perpetrator while denouncing the victim. Conversely, in cases with Korean victim, the public condemned the perpetrator and called for severe punishment. This suggest that if the victim shares the same ethnicity as the public, harsher punishment is often advocated for the perpetrator compared to cases with victims of different ethnicities. This highlights how discrimination and prejudice against foreigners influence decisions on disclosing a criminal's personal information, influenced by public opinion.

Authors

• Yujin Kim, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea

• Jeongbeen Lim, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea