KJCKorea
Journal Central

Research on human rights in South Korea has grown steadily over the past two decades across multiple disciplines, including law, political science, education, and social welfare. However, few attempts have been made to provide a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary overview of the field, as existing trend analyses have been limited to individual disciplines and based on relatively small samples. This study analyzes the thematic structure and temporal shifts in Korean human rights research by applying Contextualized Topic Modeling (CTM) to 10,739 journal articles published between 2001 and 2025, retrieved from the Korea Citation Index (KCI) using the keyword “human rights” (인권). The analysis identified 49 research topics, reclassified into eight broader categories. Topics in traditionally dominant normative and institutional areas-such as constitutional law, criminal justice, and international human rights-maintained a high overall share but exhibited a gradual decline. In contrast, topics tied to everyday life, including education and children, welfare and care, and discrimination and minorities, showed a sustained increase. Emerging issues such as climate and the environment, artificial intelligence, and anti-discrimination legislation were also found to be gaining momentum, albeit from a small base. An importance- performance analysis (IPA) framework was further applied to map the standing and trajectory of each topic across four quadrants, identifying areas of expansion, stabilization, and contraction. This study empirically charts the macro level landscape and evolving directions of human rights research in South Korea through large scale, interdisciplinary bibliometric analysis.

This study examines the court’s understanding of sexual violence manifested in male-on-male sexual violence cases to analyze how gender operates in men's victimization of sexual violence. The main findings are as follows. First, similar to male-on-female sexual violence, “obscenity” tended to serve as a criterion for determining victimization. Second, in cases of male victims of sexual violence, the recognition of coercion and the absence of suspicion of false accusation were notably more pronounced compared to cases involving female victims. Third, the court’s judgment of sexual violence was grounded in the norm that only heterosexual relations are natural; consequently, when the defendant was homosexual, a pronounced tendency to reduce sexual violence to a matter of excessive sexual desire emerged. This perspective of the court in interpreting and recognizing male-on-male sexual violence victimization exposes the contradictions of the current androcentric and heteronormative gender relations when compared to male-on-female sexual violence victimization.