According to the Hankyoreh daily, which broke this story last November, the members were given access to videos that consisted of humiliating sex acts, self-torture, self-mutilation, rape, incest, forced eating of human excrement, and other acts that were deemed too brutal to describe.
The videos featured young women, many of them underaged, who were blackmailed by Baksa (and Got-got, etc. who were the orchestrators of similar schemes) into videotaping themselves as they did Baksa's outrageously abusive bidding. Some were physically kidnapped and raped by select, trusted members and videotaped. According to reports, it worked like a flashmob for rape, trapping a helpless girl somewhere public and giving a quick shoutout to volunteers who would rush to the location to take turns to rape her.
Two things really differentiate this crime.
One, the barbaric nature of the forced acts that the orchestrators forced the victims to engage in. This wasn't pornography. These weren't sexual acts. This was a series of dehumanizing humiliation that competed against one another for how extreme they could go. It was all about being drunk with power to control someone to such an extent that they would carve out Baksa's name onto their own flesh. In essence, this was rape, pure and simple. And like rape, it wasn't about sex but power; a supremely narcissistic indulgence of power over other human beings that self-revel in the process of making the victims less than human.
Two, the sheer number of members. Perhaps this is the most shocking. Let me repeat the number: 260,000! If we take that there are approximately 3.4 million males between 15―24 years, 260,000 represent 7.6 percent of that demographic group. Even accounting for potential double-counting, a significant percentage of young men in Korea went through up to five distinct and separate steps to gain access to such vile videos.
This wasn't a kid accidentally happening on PORNHUB.com. Gaining membership required intention, persistence, and willingness to contribute to the evil debauchery of the group by submitting your own videos or participating in chats that would denigrate the victims whose videos they were watching.
In short, close to 10 percent of young men in Korea willingly consumed and de-facto engaged in rape and torture of hapless young women, many of whom were from disregarded and vulnerable situations. This is not some marginal number that you can explain away with the tired "boys will be boys" argument. This is not youthful sexual adventurism or even collective pornography addiction. Nor are these young men all from broken homes with bad parenting. This is a symptom of an underlying culture that's sick and diseased.
Wikipedia describes motivation behind rape as such: "The goal of this rapist is to humiliate, debase and hurt their victim; they express their contempt for their victim through physical violence and profane language. For these rapists, sex is a weapon to defile and degrade the victim..."
Exactly. They acted to debase and dehumanize their collective victims. Literally, they made the victims less than human. In one particularly popular video, the victim was supposedly forced to bark like a dog. The whole thing was a continuous act of crass objectification of another human being, a group psychopathic experience willingly partaken.
And where did these young men learn to objectify and abuse other human beings in such an extreme way? In the very culture created by their parents and grandparents in which wealth became synonymous with human worth and ordinary people were treated like interchangeable and dispensable commodities that could be bought and sold, traded for and discarded when no longer productive.
Korea's dizzying industrialization was built off the mass objectification of people as impersonal cogs ceaselessly churning the economic engines of Korea, Inc. This attitude is pervasive in both belief and actions throughout Korean society. It's a cultural pathology.
And as children became adults in such a world that teaches them at every turn that people are objects to be abused by the more powerful, is it any wonder that a great number of them would take the opportunity to assert their power as men over women, as mainstream over marginalized members of society, and as a group against hapless individuals to reenact the corrosive power relationships they have witnessed?
Of course, this isn't meant to excuse their criminal behavior ― after all, one has to be accountable for one's own choices and pay to the fullest extent of the law. However, these young men grew up in a culture where objectification and dehumanization of the person are reproduced and amplified at every level of society. The sheer number of abusers inevitably speak to this underlying, society-wide cancer that Korea must cut out before it metastasizes beyond control and eventually kills its host.
260,000. That's a wakeup call if there ever was one.
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.