[Column] The Stigmatizing Effect of the Term 'Multicultural Families'

Negative Bias Perpetuated by the Media
A Social Climate That Hinders the Inclusion of Multicultural Families

One peculiar point discovered while reporting on the [The Unvarnished Truth of International Marriage] series, which examines issues of international marriage and multicultural families, was that experts in the field uniformly avoid using the term "multicultural family," which carries a negative connotation. They said they are cautious about using the term due to its "stigmatizing effect." Referring to every international marriage household as a multicultural family actually creates unnecessary prejudice.

At first, coming from a background where I casually used the term multicultural family, I did not understand this. Generally, the term multicultural family is thought to refer collectively to households formed through international marriage. The term emerged with the enactment of the Multicultural Family Support Act in 2008 and refers to households where a Korean marries a foreign spouse through international marriage.

However, currently, the term multicultural family is used in a very narrow sense in various media. It mainly refers to households where a Korean husband and a woman from a less developed country meet through a brokerage agency and marry. On YouTube, searching for multicultural family mostly yields videos of Korean men over 50 and young Vietnamese women meeting through brokerage agencies. In contrast, searching for international marriage shows couples of young Koreans and Caucasians, or Koreans and Japanese.

On portals, the keyword multicultural family is mostly linked to negative content. Social news articles follow stories where foreign wives collude with illegal brokerage agencies to steal money from Korean husbands and flee, or where Korean husbands assault their foreign wives. Educational programs on multicultural families mainly deal with domestic conflicts between young wives from Southeast Asia, such as Vietnam or Cambodia, and their Korean husbands, who are often much older and live in rural farming areas. The stigmatizing effect that multicultural families are not normal families continues to be produced.

The stigmatizing effect extends directly to students born into multicultural families. Once labeled as from a multicultural family, they are perceived as coming from problematic households and are not welcomed in regular schools. Even children growing up in perfectly harmonious families are often stigmatized as troublemakers or subjects for management once confined by the term multicultural family. As a result, the number of students from multicultural families exceeded 190,000 last year, with most concentrated in about 40 schools in Gyeonggi Province known as multicultural-concentrated schools. The excessive concentration has led the Ministry of Education to recently announce plans to disperse multicultural students more evenly.

Before the government and various social sectors introduce various cash support policies for multicultural families, they must first work to remove the stigmatizing effect embedded in the terminology. It is necessary to consider why multicultural students dislike being called from multicultural families the most.