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It is time to get tougher on perpetrators
The seriousness of the country's pervasive digital sex crimes was revealed in a report from Human Rights Watch last week that sent a shockwave across the country. It's a national shame that the international human rights group saw the necessity to publish such a report, titled "My Life is Not Your Porn: Digital Sex Crimes in South Korea," singling out the country.
Online sex crimes featured in the report, which is based on 38 interviews with survivors of such crimes and experts, go beyond the imagination. One victim received a clock as a gift from her boss. She put the clock, which later turned out to be a spy camera, in her bedroom. The clock then proceeded to stream footage from the inside of the victim's bedroom to her boss's cellphone around the clock.
In other instances, young women have fallen victim to "revenge porn," or nonconsensual pornography, which is posted online by scorned ex-boyfriends. The victims often find it difficult to lead a normal life, as their photos, addresses and phone numbers are made public. "Digital sex crimes have become so common in South Korea that they are affecting the quality of life of all women and girls," Heather Barr, the report's author, said in an online conference.
Sex crime prosecutions involving illegal filming rose 11-fold between 2008 and 2017. However, out of 5,437 perpetrators who were prosecuted for digital sex crimes in 2017, only 119, or 2 percent, were imprisoned. In 2019, prosecutors dropped 43.5 percent of digital sex crime cases, compared to 27.7 percent for homicides and 19 percent of cases involving robbery. Given these facts, light penalties appear to have prompted the spread of online digital crimes.
The government has taken some steps to deal with such crimes and assist survivors of these offenses. But many problems still remain unresolved. What's needed first, for images that have already been released in the public sphere, is to introduce a system in which a court orders the removal of non-consensual digital images within 12 hours from when the victim reports them.
