For the last 62 years, if you cheated on your spouse in South Korea, you could be arrested and put in prison.  On Thursday, South Korea’s constitutional court overturned a law that made adultery a crime, saying that it violated the nation’s constitution.  The court said that a person’s sex life is private and that each individual has rights to pursue happiness and choose their own fate.  Up until this point, anyone who cheated on their husband or wife in South Korea could be charged and, if convicted, could spend up to two years in prison.  This law also applied to the person who fornicated with the cheating spouse, putting that person at risk for a conviction and prison time as well.  South Korean society has changed so much since since the enactment of this law in 1953 that the government wanted to drop many of these anti-adultery laws.

The nation’s original reason for enacting this law was to protect women, thinking that men, who were usually had more power in a marriage, took advantage of women.  If a woman and a man were getting a divorce, and the man had cheated on the woman, the woman might receive more compensation from the divorce proceedings after dropping the charges from the man’s adultery crime.  The opposing view of legalizing adultery is that it may hurt efforts to promote family life in South Korea.  Statistics show, from a survey from 2000, that 40% of marriages in South Korea end in divorce. And, between 2000 and 2006, at least 47.1% of those divorces came about after one or more of the spouses cheated.  The changing of this law will give South Koreans much more freedom than they have ever had.

Sources:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/26/asia/south-korea-adultery/index.html