Korean people's most important festival in a year, Chuseok, is revealing an increasingly difficult issue to ignore.
According to preliminary statistics released by South Korean police on September 27, during this year's Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, the police received an average of 1,294 reports of domestic violence per day. This is a 42.4% increase from the usual average of 908.9 reports per day this year; even compared to last year’s Mid-Autumn Festival, there was an increase of 13%. Similarly, reports of dating-related violence also increased, from an average of 305.8 incidents per day to 356 incidents per day, representing a 16.4% increase.
This is not a new phenomenon this year. Over the past few years, this trend has been on the rise.
From 2021 to 2025, the number of domestic violence reports during Korean Eulji festivals averaged 914, 915, 937, 1049, and 1145 respectively; this year it has further risen to 1294. In other words, the data for the six Eulji festivals combined shows a continuous upward trend, resembling a straight line.
Moreover, this cannot be simply explained as “Koreans tend to argue with each other during festivals”. In fact, from an annual perspective, domestic violence in Korea is becoming increasingly serious.
In 2025, the number of reports of domestic violence in South Korea reached approximately 289,000, compared to about 219,000 in 2021. The number of reports of dating-related violence also increased from about 57,000 during the same period to over 105,000.
So, Autumn Eve and Mid-Autumn are more like an annual “stress test”.
Parents who usually live separately, adult children, siblings, and relatives of marriage can be brought back into a family space within a few days. Contradictions that could be temporarily overshadowed by distance, such as support, money, child rearing, rituals, household chores division, and mother-in-law relationships, are also brought together at the same dining table.
South Korea's family structures have become highly compacted, but some traditional festival customs still maintain the role requirements of the extended family. Park Seong-deok, a marriage counseling expert in South Korea, pointed out that many conflicts between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law during festivals are essentially problems within relationships between husbands and wives. Modern couples live in nuclear families, but during festivals, they are once again required to act according to the roles of "sons" and "daughters-in-law" in traditional extended families.
This is also why it cannot be considered domestic violence when dealing with the concept of 'Autumn Eve'. Festivals do not create violence out of thin air, but they do lead to prolonged exposure among family members, making existing control issues, economic pressures, and relationship conflicts even more difficult to avoid.
It is evident that the South Korean police are also increasingly dealing with issues in this manner.
This year during the autumn holidays, the police carried out a special security operation that lasted for 11 days. Before the holiday began, the police confirmed the situations of 31,605 victims of “relational crimes” one by one, and shared the information of 9,055 high-risk individuals with local police and the 112 Command Center in advance.
This means that domestic violence, stalking, and dating violence are evolving from traditional ‘family disputes’ to a type of public safety issue that requires early risk identification.
From 914 cases to 1294 cases, the continuous increase in reports of domestic violence on the Korean "Reunification Festival" is something that deserves close attention. Perhaps what is truly alarming is not the increasing danger of this festival in Korea.
On the contrary: Qiu Xi simply exposes those issues that are usually concealed by distance, work, and silence at once.
