Supreme Court finds daycare director liable after 1-year-old fell into hot soup pot during enrollment visit

South Korea's Supreme Court has ruled that a daycare center director bears responsibility for injuries suffered by a 1-year-old child who wandered into a kitchen and fell into a pot of hot soup during an enrollment consultation.

The Supreme Court's Second Division, presided over by Justice Eom Sang-pil, overturned a lower court's acquittal of the director on charges of negligence causing bodily injury and remanded the case to Daejeon District Court, legal sources said Thursday.

The incident occurred in May 2023 at a daycare center in South Chungcheong Province. The child, who had come with her mother for an enrollment consultation, repeatedly tried to leave the director's office. The director told the mother the facility was safe and that teachers were present outside, and suggested letting the child explore the daycare freely.

The director then took the child out of the office, asked the childcare teachers to watch her and returned to the consultation. The child wandered alone through the facility, entered an unlocked kitchen and fell into a pot of yukgaejang — a spicy beef stew — sitting on the floor, sustaining burns.

The trial court found the director, the cook and the childcare teachers all guilty. The appellate court acquitted the director, reasoning that requiring her to assign a dedicated teacher to a child who had not yet completed enrollment was unreasonable, and that the direct cause of the accident lay with the cook and the childcare teachers.

The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that what mattered was not whether the child had formally enrolled but whether the daycare had effectively assumed responsibility for her care. Because the director had taken the child from her guardian and sent her into the daycare's care area, the child was under the facility's protection at the time of the accident.

The court held that when the director sent the child out of the office, she was obligated to take measures — such as assigning a specific teacher — to ensure the child was actually supervised. It also found that even though the cook and the childcare teachers shared in the negligence, that did not sever the causal link between the director's breach of her duty of care and the accident.