The two safest OECD countries for females are Greece and Ireland

Yoon Ja-young:

Korea has the 5th highest number of murdered females among 28 member states of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).

According to a recent report by Joint OECD/Korea Regional Center on Health Social Policy, 1.5 out of every 100,000 Korean females were murdered in 2005.

Korea follows the United States, Hungary, Finland and Luxemburg.

U.S. topped the list with the highest rate of 3.2 per 100,000 females, followed by 1.8 in Hungary, 1.7 in Finland and 1.6 in Luxemburg.

The average female murder rate of OECD member countries stood at 1 for every 100,000 women.

The two safest countries for females on the other end of the list were Greece and Ireland, where only 0.3 out of 100,000 females were murdered.

The comparison shows that Korean women are five times more likely to be murdered than females in Greece or Ireland.

Japan, Italy and Spain were also among the safe places, with 0.4 females murdered out of 100,000 women, and the United Kingdom followed with 0.5.

"There have been around 1,000 murder cases every year in Korea on average, with the figure not changing much. Recently, however, there have been a notable number of serial killings of women among murder cases," said Kwak Dae-gyung, criminology professor at Dongguk University.

Korea’s average murder victimization rate for men was 1.7 per 100,000 males, which is lower than the OECD average at 2. The United States topped the list with 11 per 100,000 men murdered.

Unlike other countries where women were far less likely to be murdered than men, Korean women were as much exposed to danger as Korean men.

Kwak said oftentimes both perpetrators and victims are likely to be men in capital crimes, pointing out that Korea is an unusual case since men and women are almost equal in terms of the victimization ratio.

I am surprised that the Irish media is apparently ignoring this story.