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.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of