Korea's 2021 Stalking Punishment Act was the product of two decades of advocacy. Before it, stalking conduct was prosecuted (when at all) under petty harassment ordinances with maximum fines that rarely deterred repeat offenders. The new statute set criminal penalties: up to 3 years imprisonment, up to 5 years for repeated offenses, and contemplated approach-prohibition orders.
The Sentencing Commission published a guideline tier in 2023, with recommended ranges of 6 months to 3 years depending on duration, frequency, and victim impact. On paper, this is exactly the kind of standardization the proportionality principle is supposed to enable.
In practice, the data already shows the same statute producing class-coded outcomes. Ordinary defendants — including those who repeatedly approached former partners over months — have routinely received actual imprisonment within the guideline tier. Public-figure and white-collar defendants with comparable conduct have produced suspended sentences. The mitigators that move the lenient outcomes off the guideline are familiar: 'voluntary withdrawal' (made credible by reputational stakes), 'public service contributions,' 'no prior offense' (made credible by the absence of public-record disclosures of prior conduct), and settlement.
The pattern matters because the Stalking Act was a case study in legislative response to a documented enforcement gap. The hope was that bringing stalking into the standard sentencing system would erase the gap. The early data suggests that the gap is not in the statute — it is in the structural inputs to the mitigator system. The same patterns that produce sentencing disparity in chaebol embezzlement are reproducing themselves in stalking, almost unchanged. Standardizing the statute did not, by itself, standardize the outcomes.