Even a record heatwave will not keep Claire Lee from joining tens of thousands of South Korean women at a mass protest today against secretly filmed spy-cam pornography as anger over the issue swells, prompting national soul-searching.
Since May, the monthly demonstration in Seoul has shattered records to become the biggest-ever women’s protest in South Korea, where the global #MeToo movement has unleashed an unprecedented wave of female-led activism.
The target of their fury: So-called molka, or spy-cam videos, which largely involve men secretly filming women in schools, offices, trains, toilets and changing rooms, and which are so prevalent they make headlines on a daily basis.
“Entering a public bathroom is such an unnerving experience these days,” Lee said, adding that she always looked around the walls to see if there were any “suspicious holes.”
“You never know if there’s a spy-cam lens hidden inside ... filming you while you pee,” the 21-year-old student told reporters, adding that she sometimes stabbed the holes with a pen to shatter any secret lenses, or stuffed tissue paper inside them.
The statistics are startling, with the number of spy-cam crimes reported to police surging from about 1,100 in 2010 to more than 6,500 last year.
The offenders have included school teachers, professors, doctors, church pastors, government officials, police officers and even a court judge. In some cases, the victims’ own boyfriends or relatives were responsible for the crimes, in a troubling reflection of South Korea’s deep-rooted patriarchal norms.
Fed up of living in fear, women are fighting back.
More than 55,000 attended last month’s protest in Seoul, according to its organizers, although police put the attendance at about 20,000.
“The pent-up anger among women has finally reached a boiling point,” said one of the protest organizers, who only identified herself as Ellin.
Asia’s fourth-largest economy takes pride in its tech prowess, from ultra-fast Internet to cutting-edge smartphones.
However, these advances have also given rise to an army of tech-savvy Peeping Toms, with videos widely shared in Internet chat rooms and on file-sharing sites, or used as ads for Web sites promoting prostitution.
Although all manufacturers of smartphones sold in South Korea are required to ensure their devices make a loud shutter noise when taking photographs — a move designed to curb covert filming — many offenders use special apps that mute the sound, or turn to high-tech spy cameras hidden inside eyeglasses, lighters, watches, car keys and even neckties.
Justice is rarely served — most offenders are fined or given suspended jail terms, which many women’s rights groups decry as a mere slap on the wrist, except in the rare cases where the perpetrator is female and the victim male, campaigners have said.
The arrest in May of a woman who secretly filmed a male model posing nude at a Seoul art college was a catalyst for the unprecedented protests this summer.
“The police have rarely responded when countless female victims asked for the immediate arrest of the offender,” said Seo Seung-hui, head of the nonprofit Korea Cyber Sexual Violence Response Center.
In the woman’s case, she was paraded in front of TV cameras while police raided her home to search for evidence.
Authorities even launched a probe targeting those who shamed the male model online in an uncharacteristically swift response.
“The women saw how quickly ... the police responded to this rare case in which the victim was a man... Such unfair treatment fueled the recent wave of anger,” Seo said.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.