#CoerciveConversionDay #Victims #rememberGu #HumanRights

On 7th October 2019, Human Rights Association Against Coercive Conversion Programs (HAC) hosted a memorial in commemoration of the victims of 'coercive conversion', the late Ji-in Gu and Sun Hwa Kim in Seoul, Republic of Korea (South Korea). The memorial was purposed to raise awareness of the ongoing suffering of many believers and families torn apart by coercive conversion, and to call for eradication of the practice and for punishment of its perpetrators.

Coercive conversion is a practice established and implemented by the Christian Council of Korea (CCK), which is an organisation of churches in Korea founded on Presbyterian doctrine in 1989. Coercive conversion pastors target believers from up-and-coming church denominations by deceiving their families - often parents - into believing that their loved one has joined a cult. Upon the pastor’s counsel, families feed their loved ones sleeping pills and abduct them to a remote location where they are handcuffed and robbed of their phones. They are then subjected to physical and psychological abuse until they renounce their religious beliefs and consent to receiving Presbyterian ‘conversion education’. To date, a staggering 1300 believers (mainly in their late teens and 20s) in South Korea have been subjected to this barbaric practice. All this in a supposedly democratic country with a constitutional law which enshrines religious freedoms - article 20 stating that "all citizens enjoy the freedom of religion”.

In the worst case, coercive conversion has resulted in murder. Sun Hwa Kim was bludgeoned to death with a hammer by her ex-husband in October 2007, and Ji-In Gu was suffocated to death at the hands of her own parents on January 9th 2018 for being believers in minority churches. Following the murder of Ji-In Gu, a 120,000-strong rally hosted by HAC was held in Seoul calling on the government to intervene to ban coercive conversion, enact a law against it and punish the culprits. In February 2018, 25,000 HAC members and citizens gathered outside the HQ of the CCK and its mouthpiece, Christian Broadcasting System (CBS) in Seoul. Similar global rallies followed including in Washington D.C. and New York, leading to denunciation of the practice by the United Nations. Staggeringly, the Korean government has failed to release a single statement and the majority of the perpetrators (pastors) have gone unpunished because they label this programme 'counselling', and use victims' families to their advantage, masking their true intent for financial profit. In the last ten years, CCK pastors have received 12,000 sentences for crimes including fraud, burglary, forgery, defamation, drink-driving, arson and sexual assault.