[kijin]

If you send a student somewhere outside of the classroom, the parents can argue that 1) you deprived him/her of educational opportunities; 2) you mentally abused him/her by sending her alone into the dark, scary corridor; and 3) you damaged his/her self-esteem by doing this in front of all the other students. If the parents are in a particularly vindictive mood, they can probably get a psychiatrist to back up their bullshit, too.

None of these charges are likely to stick under the revised legal framework, but the mere threat of a lawsuit can be tremendously burdensome to a young teacher just out of college. The teacher who committed suicide in Gangnam last summer was only 23 years old.