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| Consultants receive phone calls at the Digital Sex Crime Victim Support Center in Jung-gu, central Seoul, Nov. 3. /Courtesy of Women's Human Rights Institute of Korea |
By Kim Jae-heun
Spreading sexual content on the internet, including voyeur videos and revenge porn, has become a serious problem here, with its means of circulation diversifying along with technological development.
The Women's Human Rights Institute of Korea, an affiliated organization of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, said putting a stop to the spread of sexually explicit pictures or videos shared without consent of the person shown is no longer as simple as requesting a website operator to delete the content.
"The invention of the smartphone has allowed people to take pictures and shoot videos of sexually explicit scenes and share them online," Ryu Hae-jin, consultant team manager at Digital Sex Crime Victim Support Center in central Seoul, said during an interview with The Korea Times last month.
"Some 75 percent of the crimes are committed by people close to the victim, most often a spouse or romantic partner. It becomes easier for a man to control his girlfriend or wife by threatening to disclose sexually compromising content if their relationship sours," Ryu said.
The government opened the support center on April 30 to help victims remove sexually explicit content of them from the internet. Removing materials spread online or preventing their distribution through a private agency used to require a large amount of money and even then did not guarantee good results.
Nearly 1,800 victims have called the center to ask for help in the last six months, and the center has deleted nearly 20,000 videos, according to the ministry.
The center received between 120 and 150 phone calls a week in the beginning, and now averages around 140 phone calls weekly. Over 90 percent of the consultations are made by phone but there are other channels available for victims to request help including the center's social media and its official website.
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| A member of the video deletion team works in the office at the Digital Sex Crime Victim Support Center in Jung-gu, central Seoul. / Courtesy of Women's Human Rights Institute of Korea |
"The most common case is that a woman says she broke up recently with her boyfriend, who blackmails her, saying that he will spread sex videos they shot together. The first thing such a victim asks us for help with is to prevent him from doing so and to delete the videos if they have already been uploaded online because they can spread far out of control," Ryu said.
"In many cases, the victims have already reported their cases to the police but there are too many procedures for victims to go through, and the process is very shameful."
If the content has been updated on domestic websites or file-sharing platforms, it is a stroke of good luck. Some file-sharing sites base their platform's IP address in other countries and the support center cannot bring down the sites through domestic law alone.
"The worst case, however, is when the content is shared on a P2P platform. People exchange files between their personal computers and it is impossible for us to delete them or know if they've been deleted permanently," Ryu said.
Laws and systems need revision
Korea has one of the worst digital sex crime problems in the world― but it has no particular laws regarding their prevention or punishment.
Developed countries like the United States, Germany, France and Japan have specific laws to deal with digital crimes such as revenge porn.
"Currently, Korea can only punish those who make images of their partner and spread it online. If a person uploads naked pictures or sex videos taken by the victims themselves, the perpetrator will not be subjected to punishment according to the sex crime law," Ryu said.
Victims have to view the sexual content with police officers if they want to report the case for an investigation.
"The victims, mostly women, have to confirm it is their body in the images at the police station and it is a very shameful procedure. It is a mandatory process by current law and a female victim feels definitely more shame if the police officer is a man," Ryu said.
The consultants at the support center also suffer from exposure to so much sexual content at work. There are only six consultants who take more than 100 calls a week and listen to victims' stories, and eight staffers who track down and delete the materials online.
The ministry has promised to double the budget to support victims of online sex crimes next year and the center will recruit 10 more workers.
"We can claim back the money spent on deleting content to the offenders according to the revision of a relevant law. But there has not yet been a single court ruling in favor of victims ordering the offenders to pay the expenses," Ryu said.
