South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea, is often seen as an economic miracle, based on its rapid economic growth in the period after the Korean War (1950-1953) through the present. As part of this boom, the country became a leader in technological advances, with the world’s highest rate of adult smart phone ownership, one of the world’s fastest internet speeds, and 99.5 percent of households having access to the internet.
But South Korea’s rapid economic and technological development has not been accompanied by similarly rapid advancement in gender equality. Traditional Confucian patriarchal values remain deeply embedded in society. Confucianism is a philosophical and ethical system, which highlights social hierarchy and harmony. A woman’s position in society is lower than a man’s and her reputation, which can impact her access to employment and her personal relations, depends largely on maintaining an image of “sexual purity.”
In the 2021 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap ranking, South Korea ranked 102 out of 156 countries, with the largest gap on economic participation and opportunity of any advanced economy. South Korean women do four times as much unpaid work as men and face a 32.5 percent gender pay gap.
Gender-based violence is widespread, even compared to the global estimates that 1 in 3 women experience such violence; in a 2017 survey of 2,000 South Korean men, nearly 80 percent of respondents admitted to having perpetrated violence against an intimate partner.
South Korea is rare globally in having a homicide rate that is equal for men and women.In 2008, less than 4 percent of sex crimes prosecutions in South Korea involved illegal filming; by 2017 the number of these cases had increased eleven-fold, from 585 cases to 6,615, and they constituted 20 percent of sex crimes prosecutions.
Much of the public attention to digital sex crimes was initially driven by use of tiny cameras (“spycams”) to covertly record footage in places like toilets, changing rooms, and hotels, with perpetrators sometimes earning money by selling the footage to websites that are able to use them to generate revenue by selling access to the photos or using them to drive advertising sales.
Spycams are tiny, easily concealed, and come in different forms including disguised as an ordinary household item such as a clock, calculator, clothing hook, or coffee cup. They are inexpensive and can operate for extended periods on a battery.
A painting installed with a hidden camera on display at a spy camera shop in the port city of Incheon, South Korea, on March 22, 2019. © 2019 JUNG YEON-JE/AFP via Getty Images
The overwhelming majority of the people targeted in digital sex crimes are women—80 percent in spycam cases. The overwhelming majority of perpetrators are male; in 2016, 98 percent of perpetrators in spycam cases were men.
Digital sex crimes include capturing intimate images without consent, an abuse that happens not just among strangers in spaces like toilets and changing rooms, but also between people who know each other, in workplaces, at schools and universities, and between intimate partners.
Cases detailed in this report include a woman who died by suicide after being filmed in her workplace changing room. Several cases discussed below involve intimate partners who captured women’s images without consent, or women who learned that a man they regarded as a friend had secretly filmed them.
Other digital sex crimes involve non-consensual sharing of images that may have been captured with consent, but were not intended to be shared, such as images taken by or sent to an intimate partner or images taken of models who consented to being photographed but did not consent to the images being shared or sold.
A third category of digital sex crimes involved faked or manipulated images, often used by perpetrators who impersonate their victim online to attack her reputation, relationships, and safety.
Several survivors faced devastating harm after a perpetrator who knew them well impersonated them online, using faked or manipulated intimate images, in order to smear their reputation.
Although not documented in this report, several government officials and service providers also noted that cases of sexual violence increasingly have a digital component, where a rapist may film the crime and share or threaten to share the images online.
Anger over government inaction regarding digital sex crimes boiled over in South Korea in 2018, after a woman was jailed for posting a nude photo of a man while men usually go free in such cases. The case sparked a series of six protests, with tens of thousands of women marching through the streets of Seoul chanting slogans including, “My life is not your porn,” and “Are we not human?”
The government responded with legislation to expand the range of acts punishable as digital sex crimes and to toughen penalties. It also established a center to assist survivors of digital sex crimes.
But as this report documents, the steps the government has taken are not sufficient. At the heart of the government response is a failure to appreciate how deep the impact of digital sex crimes is on survivors.
Once a non-consensual image has been shared once, or the victim simply fears it might be shared, the fear of the image appearing or reappearing hangs over the survivor indefinitely.
Succeeding in having the photos removed from specific websites provides no sense of security, as anyone who has ever viewed them even for a second could have taken a screen shot and can share that screen shot any time. Any anonymous viewer can save, upload, and distribute the screenshot on any website or websites—from which it may spread uncontrollably.
Survivors of digital sex crimes grapple with trauma so deep that it at times leads to suicide, including in two cases discussed in this report. Many others consider suicide.
This trauma is often worsened by retraumatizing encounters with police and justice officials, and by the expectation that survivors should gather evidence for their case and monitor the internet for new appearances of images of themselves, which leaves them immersed in the abuse. Survivors also face stigma which can harm their relationships and access to education and employment.
Women and girls who have been the target of digital sex crimes face major barriers to justice. Police often refuse to accept their complaints and behave in abusive ways, including minimizing harm, blaming them, treating images insensitively, and engaging in inappropriate interrogation.
When cases move ahead, survivors struggle to obtain information about their cases and to have their voices heard by the court. Judges also frequently impose low sentences.
Government data shows that in the majority of cases where a report is accepted, a suspect is investigated, and once a suspect is investigated that person is usually prosecuted.
But available data suggests that prosecutors drop many of these cases. In 2019, prosecutors dropped 46.8 percent of sex crime cases compared to 27.7 percent of homicide cases and 19 percent of robbery cases, meanwhile prosecutors dropped 43.5 percent of digital sex crimes cases, limited to crimes of sexual violence using cameras, distributing pictures without consent and production and distribution of child and youth sexual exploitation content.
When cases move forward, they usually result in conviction; in 2020, out of 1,849 cases involving charges of capturing intimate images without consent that went to trial only 12 resulted in acquittal.
But when these prosecutions result in convictions, the sentences are relatively light; in 2020, 79 percent of those convicted of capturing intimate images without consent received a suspended sentence, a fine, or a combination of the two.
Fifty-two percent received only a suspended sentence. The same year, 82 percent of people convicted of distributing sexual images captured and/or distributed without consent received a suspended sentence or a fine or a combination of the two, with the most common sentence (for 53 percent of convicted defendants) being just a fine.
Between the cases where survivors are pressured to drop charges and those dropped by prosecutors and low sentences, the likelihood of any single case resulting in significant punishment is low. In 2017, out of 5,437 perpetrators who were arrested for digital sex crimes, only 119, or 2 percent, were imprisoned.
Digital sex crime cases resulting in conviction are more commonly resolved with measures such as relatively low fines and mandatory classes, even in situations where there has been deep harm to the victim.
The problems survivors face in the justice system are exacerbated by a lack of women police, prosecutors, and judges. Civil remedies such as damages from the perpetrator or injunctive relief are also not effective remedies readily pursuable by the survivors because filing a complaint in civil court would require victims to indicate their names and addresses, making this information available to the public, including to the perpetrator, something few survivors are comfortable doing.
The most important gap in the government’s response to digital sex crimes is its failure to take meaningful steps to prevent these crimes, by changing the deep gender inequity that normalizes consumption of non-consensual intimate images.
A key part of prevention should be teaching children—and adults—about healthy and consensual sexuality and responsible digital citizenship. South Korea’s system for providing sexuality education is cursory, incomplete, and riddled with sexist stereotypes.
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