Digital sex crimes devastate South Korean women, report finds

On the streets of tech-savvy South Korea, the latest and most innovative gadgets are flashing in people’s hands as soon as they become available.

Less visible are miniature spy cameras, which in recent years have resulted in billing for internet-based sex crimes that destroyed women’s lives, sparked scandals, and sparked massive offline protests. The cameras lurk in watches, coat hooks, coffee mugs and calculators and capture women in the subway and in the bedroom.

Digital sex crimes involving secretly recorded or falsified intimate images distributed or sold without the consent of the person concerned have driven women in South Korea to suicide, forced them to move abroad, or left them with lifelong trauma, according to a leading human rights group at one published report Wednesday.

Many victims received inadequate law enforcement or counseling support, even though cases against their perpetrators were often dropped or resulted in disproportionately light sentences, Human Rights Watch said.

The 90-page report is a ruthless recap of the reality underlying a series of digital sex crime scandals that have rocked the country in recent years, fueling a quest for ingrained sexism and sparking an unprecedented surge in feminist activism to boot violent backlash.

In 2018 tens of thousands of women marched on the streets against spy cam footage, rallying around the shout, “My life is not your porn.” In 2019, K-pop stars were disgraced and jailed after revelations were made that they secretly recorded women and swapped clips. In 2020, the country learned of a “blackmail ring” blackmailing women, including many minors, into providing sexually explicit material that was sold in an anonymous chat room with up to a quarter of a million subscribers.

“This problem has gotten more serious in Korea faster than anywhere else I can think of,” said Heather Barr, interim co-director of women’s rights at Human Rights Watch, who wrote the report. South Korea offers “important lessons for the whole world”.

The crimes underscore the double-edged nature of South Korea’s acclaimed technological achievement, which boasts some of the fastest internet speeds in the world and the highest smartphone usage rates. As the country is increasingly connected, spy camera crime has more than thirteen-fold increased from less than 600 in 2008 to more than 7,730 in 2015. In recent years, the trend has been declining as education and detection efforts intensified, with 5,168 reported in the past year.

Still, according to the report, only 2% of cases resulted in jail time in 2017. Last year, 4 out of 5 convicts received only a suspended sentence or a fine.

A woman interviewed for the report was given a watch by her boss, which she kept in her bedroom, only to find out later that it was equipped with a hidden camera. Another former boyfriend photoshoped her face with half-naked pictures of other women and put them online with their address and contact information. Another said she slept in a tent in her home after being secretly picked up through a window, the report said.

The crimes are fueled by a deeply ingrained culture of inequality and sexist attitudes, in which men carelessly share illegal images with one another. In a society steeped in patriarchy that requires women to remain “sexually pure,” victims are left with persistent trauma, the human rights group said.

“It’s like murder, even though he didn’t use a knife or a weapon. It’s like murdering someone’s identity or mentality, “one of the victims, in whom strange men showed up at home and at work after their ex-boyfriend posted pictures of her, told Human Rights Watch.

As in other countries, South Korea’s laws, institutions, and norms have battled a rapidly changing online landscape, where atrocities perpetrated in cyberspace are geographically infinite and can probably never be erased from the Internet.

“Once a non-consensual picture has been shared or the victim simply fears it might be shared, the fear that the picture will appear or reappear indefinitely hangs over the survivor,” the report’s authors write. “Any anonymous viewer can save the screenshot, upload it and distribute it on any website or website – from where it can spread uncontrollably.”

A police detective quoted in the report told of a college student who dropped out of school and moved to the United States after a video of her having sex with a friend spread on the Internet. But she was recognized by Koreans in her new home. She had to undergo plastic surgery to change her appearance but, according to the report, could not live a normal life even then.

In a tech version of a Whack-a-Mole game, victims described looking for illegal pictures of themselves online to collect as evidence and making individual removal requests on each website.

“I deleted one and 10 more posts would appear,” said one woman in the group.

Following last year’s sextortion scandal, lawmakers passed law increasing penalties for owning non-consensual pictures and making service providers responsible for monitoring and deleting illegal material.

Whether the law will reduce online sex crime remains to be seen. In the past few months, a high school teacher, an Air Force sergeant and a McDonald’s employee have all been caught on suspicion of secretly admitting women.