“Private,” “a matter of female chastity,” “unimportant,” “shameful.” These tend to be the words showing the attitude towards survivors of sexual violence in South Korea; it’s what suppresses the voices of victims and perpetuates a culture of guilt and silent suffering.
Many of South Korea’s societal institutions employ strong patriarchal norms to this day: current president Yoon Seok Yeol threatened to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family in 2022. The country’s judicial system has a historically lax approach to prosecuting offenders of sexual crimes. South Korean women report experiencing gender-based discrimination in the workplace at a rate three to four times higher than men. Other politicians have suggested that women are to blame for the increase in male suicide attempts.
These factors oftentimes make life for women in South Korea dangerous. In 2019, police data reported that women accounted for 98% of victims in cases of crimes against intimate partners. An analysis by Korea Women’s Hot Line found that at least one woman was killed or nearly killed by her male partner every 1.8 days that year.
Merely discussing the issue of gender inequality can be taboo or contentious. Anti-feminism is rampant, as some men believe that Korean society is gradually becoming misandrist in light of efforts to improve women’s rights over the past few decades. Danbi Hwang, a member of the feminist group Haeil, told NPR in 2022 that “Femi” (short for a feminist) is used derogatorily to label any person interested in women’s empowerment—being asked if you are a “Femi” is par with being asked if you are mentally ill.
It’s unsurprising, then, that a culture that constantly silences and fails to account for the safety of its women, coupled with rapid advancements in technology and industrialization, has fused together to create something horrifying: digital sex crimes.
A Longstanding History
Digital sex crimes are characterized by the illicit production and distribution of non-consensual, sexually explicit images online. South Korean women have been victims of this abuse in countless variations.
Molka, which translates to hidden cameras, is an all-too-common mechanism for such offenses. Micro cameras are installed in public bathrooms and changing rooms, and the footage is uploaded online and spread through social networks like Tumblr and X. Sometimes, the footage is sold to websites that generate revenue by selling access to the illegally obtained material. Police data showed that molka crimes surged from 1,353 in 2011 to 6,470 in 2017.
Yoon-Kim Ji-young of Konkuk University’s Institute of Body and Culture called it a “technologized version of male violence.” At 80%, most of the victims in molka cases are women, while in 2016, 98% of perpetrators were men.
Over the years, the South Korean government has responded with several protective measures to combat the increase in digital sex crimes, especially following the protests of 70,000 women against the lack of justice for survivors. In 2018, the Korean Women’s Human Rights Promotion Agency opened the Digital Sexual Crime Victim Support Center under the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. The center’s services include counseling, deletion of illicit material, and investigative and litigation support.
Just a couple of years later, in March 2020, South Korean journalists revealed what would become known as the “Nth room.” The media discovered at least eight secret chatrooms on the popular messaging app Telegram, where members shared and watched sexually exploitative videos of women—many of whom were minors.
Customers paid for access to the “Nth rooms,” with fees up to 1.5 million Korean won ($1,200). Korean police have reported that more than 60,000 people participated in these crimes. Because the Telegram server is located overseas, it’s harder for the police to track it, which enables the easier spread of non-consensual content.
The original article by Hankyoreh that broke the news describes separate private chatrooms dedicated specifically to child sexual abuse materials, as well as ‘knowledge rooms’ that provided cautionary measures for members in the event of a criminal investigation.
Cho Ju-bin was eventually arrested for being the mastermind behind the collective abuse. An article from The Korea Times published in April of that year stated that, at the time, no sentencing guidelines existed for digital sex crimes. But following this, the Sexual Violence Punishment law was updated to include sentencing for up to three years, or a fine of 30 million won ($22,261) for those who possess, purchase, store, and watch illegal sexual content. And on November 26th, 2020, Cho was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
AI and Worsening Crimes
The outrage surrounding the “Nth room” case and the Burning Sun scandal of the previous year should have put enough pressure on the South Korean police and government to ensure that large-scale, sexually exploitative crimes never occur again. But this year revealed another depraved way in which the combination of deep-rooted sexism and technology can damage the livelihoods of women: deepfake abuse. In the case of deepfake abuse, a real person’s face is combined with a sexually explicit body using artificial intelligence.
Telegram is, once again, at the epicenter of the problem. Yet, for the very first time, the Korean National Police announced the launch of an investigation into the app following reports of hundreds of cases of deepfake sex crimes. This came shortly after the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov on charges including the circulation of child abuse images, drug peddling, and the refusal to cooperate with authorities.
What’s especially frightening about this brand of deepfakes is the acutely personal element: “mutual friend” channels on Telegram are dedicated to the creation of illicit images of women and girls, most often by people they know. Many rooms are targeted toward university students, while others exist solely for middle school and high schools.
Even more disturbing is the nonchalance with which the crime is treated by the perpetrators. Deepfake abuse has become so common that they are essentially considered to be pranks. Two hundred ninety-seven cases were reported in the first seven months of the year, up by 180 from last year. Police reported that most of the accused were teenagers and people in their 20s.
A college student told Hankyoreh, “I have to exercise caution whenever I do group projects with male students because a perpetrator could be lurking among them. Professors, security guards, all men on campus are people to be wary of.”
The chatroom reveals understandably came as an unsettling but familiar shock—South Korean women and young girls now face the fear that any image they post online, no matter how innocuous, could be manipulated in the worst ways by people they should be able to trust.
Authorities suggest exercising social media use with caution, but middle school students, in a statement obtained by Hankyoreh, voiced their dissatisfaction with such suggestions. They wrote, “While society and the press have made those suggestions out of concern, we’re fully aware that such measures, on their own, could never resolve this issue. We cannot rest easy until a fundamental solution is found.”
The Fight Continues
On September 23rd of this year, over 6,000 women attended a protest organized by the Joint Action against Misogynistic Violence, a collaboration between six women’s universities in Seoul. Protestors expressed their collective anger toward systemic factors that leave women to suffer: an absence of proper legislation, lazy policework, and insufficient sentencing for convicts.
“The government should strictly regulate the artificial intelligence industry to prevent unlawful image manipulation,” an anonymous protestor told The Korea Times, “Similar crimes will only stop when severe penalties are imposed on workplaces that fail to comply.”
The rally made legislative waves—just days later, on September 26th, the South Korean National Assembly passed a law making it illegal to view or possess sexually exploitative deepfakes, with up to three years in prison for the offense. Another bill was passed to imprison individuals for the use of deepfakes to blackmail or coerce minors at a minimum of three and five years, respectively. Finally, the National Assembly also created legislation to facilitate the deletion of illicit material and provide support for the victims.
Furthermore, the Korea Communications Standards Commission is setting up a 24-hour hotline for victims as well as doubling the personnel responsible for monitoring digital sex crimes. They plan to create a consultative body to enhance communication with social media to aid in deleting and blocking deepfake content.
Progress is being made, but it doesn’t erase the harm of countless predators being let go with barely a slap on the wrist. Whether the police force and courts will now prioritize putting perpetrators behind bars has yet to be seen; history does not bode well for South Korean women, who will continue to struggle for an eventual future of protection and justice.
