Court-Ordered Counselling Delegation for Domestic Violence Offenders — South Korea's Article 40 Protective Disposition

South Korea does not run one single named programme but a court-ordered disposition system: under Article 40 of the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment of Domestic Violence Crimes, family court judges may order a perpetrator into delegated counselling (상담위탁) at an accredited domestic-violence counselling centre. Standards for these centres were developed by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, renamed the Ministry of Gender Equality in October 2025, which accredits and funds delivery agencies nationwide.
Referral is court-mandated as one of several possible protective dispositions a judge can select, alongside options like community service, education orders, and residential protective custody. In 2023, roughly half of all disposed domestic-violence cases nationally (6,376 of 13,074) resulted in the counselling-delegation disposition, the single most-used protective sanction in the system; the more intensive residential disposition was applied only once nationwide that year.
A peer-reviewed 2008 study spanning 65 counselling agencies and 280 perpetrators found a 43.2% dropout rate before completion, linked to unemployment, referral pathway, and gender-role attitudes. Smaller single-site controlled studies have shown short-term reductions in self-reported violence and aggression from group counselling, but no public, programme-wide recidivism dataset was found, and a 2024 newspaper investigation was critical of the system's overall leniency and underuse of more intensive measures.

Read the full analysis: https://www.khan.co.kr/article/202410311458001