The Ambiguous Crime: Seduction and Adultery in Early Modern Korea

Chogan, the crime roughly defined as “a crime in which an adulterer lures a woman out to a third person’s place [and commits adultery],” is one of the three major sexual crimes included in the early modern Korean legal code, which was based on the Chinese Great Ming Code. Situated somewhere between hwagan (adultery, or “consensual illicit sexual intercourse”) and kanggan (rape, or “coercive illicit sexual intercourse”), this crime presumably consisted of a man’s seduction first, followed by adultery by mutual consensus. Whereas adultery was clearly defined as a crime of mutual consent of both parties, and rape as a man’s crime against a nonconsenting woman, chogan, or seduction-led adultery, not only blurred the boundaries between adultery and rape but often confused judicial officials who applied it to actual cases. Drawing on the legal testimonies on sexual crimes in eighteenth-century Korea, this paper examines the complexity of chogan within the context of illuminating the gender discourse of early modern Korea. While analyzing the sophisticated and rigorous testimony procedures put into practice at the level of local courts, this study also demonstrates the potential for accommodation and reciprocity between the existing law and the people’s reactions to and use of the law, which ultimately shaped the legal outcomes for the ambiguous crime of chogan: Married women who by practically all accounts willingly engaged in affairs could successfully claim that they were the victims of chogan so as to avoid being found guilty of any crime.