Digital sex crime is so pervasive in South Korea that the fear of it is affecting the quality of life for women and girls, with many victims saying that they had considered suicide or leaving the country, a human rights watchdog said yesterday.
South Korea has become the global epicenter of the spycam — tiny, hidden cameras used to film victims naked, urinating or having sex.
Other cases have involved intimate photographs being leaked without permission, or sex abuse, such as rapes, captured on camera and the videos shared online.
Photo: AFP
Victims are often traumatized further and become “immersed in the abuse” by encounters with police and other justice officials, and by the expectation that they should gather evidence and monitor the Internet for new appearances of images of themselves, US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report.
“Digital sex crimes have become so common, and so feared, in South Korea that they are affecting the quality of life of all women and girls,” Heather Barr, the report’s author, said in a statement. “Women and girls told us they avoided using public toilets and felt anxious about hidden cameras in public and even in their homes. An alarming number of survivors of digital sex crimes said they had considered suicide.”
The report, based on 38 interviews and an online survey, said that sex crime prosecutions involving illegal filming rose 11-fold from 2008 to 2017, data released by the Korean Institute of Criminology showed.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in has called for police to investigate the growing number of sexual abuse claims, including recently among members of the military.
Last year, police broke up an online network that lured dozens of women and girls into what authorities have called “virtual enslavement” by blackmailing them into sending increasingly degrading and sometimes violent sexual imagery of themselves.
HRW said that the government needs to do more by increasing legal penalties for convicted offenders; increasing the number of women among the police, prosecutors and judges; and changing broader gender inequality that normalizes the consumption of non-consensual images.
In 2019, prosecutors dropped 43.5 percent of digital sex crime cases, compared with 27.7 percent of homicide cases and 19 percent of robbery cases, although the sex crime cases that were prosecuted usually ended in a conviction, the report said.
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