Joint Family Suicide in South Korea

The recent phenomenon of parent-child suicide pacts is related to the family concepts in modern South Korea. The traditional Confucius concepts emphasize the superior authority of the father in the family, they mean the child's excessive subordination to the father. So, the social recognition of the child's individuality had not developed in South Korea. . As a result, South Korea tend to regard a child murder followed by a parent's suicide as a familial suicide pact. Extensive pseudo-familial social networks are to be built to solve an acute problem in the family. The institution of the nuclear family in South Korea since the early twenty century has made a parent's crisis. The frequent ‘parent-child suicide pacts' in South Korea suggest that the strong social ideology of the nuclear family, which urges the strict division of gender roles and the performative gender identities based on such roles, is no longer congruous with rapidly changing socioeconomic situations in recent decades.