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Participants prepare a commemorative march for the victim of a recent murder in Gangnam

Members of right-wing online communities have been issuing threats and obstructing efforts to commemorate a young woman recently murdered in a public bathroom near Gangnam Subway Station in Seoul. Women taking part in rallies to honor the victim are suffering a new kind of terror - forced to wear masks for fear their identities will be revealed.

Most of the women attending a commemoration rally at Exit 10 of the station on May 21 were wearing white masks. Their decision to do so came after members of the far-right online community Ilbe Storehouse posted secretly filmed images of women participating in previous memorials or speaking in television interviews.

“Part of it is that we want this to be a quiet rally to commemorate [the victim], but a lot of people are also worried about what will happen if their faces are shown,” said one participant.

An official proposal to wear masks for the commemoration was posted on May 22 on a Facebook page called “Down with Crimes against Women.”

“Women have to be careful even when we’re mourning. How much more do we have to suffer?” asked one mourner.

A suspected Ilbe member also spent his late-night hours defacing sticky notes posted by Daejeon citizens to commemorate the Gangnam victim. According to reports on Ilbe’s bulletin board, nearly 90% of the memorial notes posted by citizens in front of Exit 3 of Daejeon‘s City Hall subway station disappeared between the evening of May 21 and the next morning. Previously, one full wall of the entrance had been filled with messages posted as of May 21 after Daejeon-area university students began putting them up on May 19.

At 5:50 am on May 22, an Ilbe user with the ID “secondyear○○○” posted a message under the title “I Tore Down the Post-Its.” It included a photograph showing an individual doing a “confirmation shot” pose with his fingers in front of the torn notes.

“There were more than I’d expected, and before I knew it the sun had come up,” the user wrote.

He said that after Daejeon, he would do the same in Daegu and Gangnam. The post was later removed.

During a memorial on May 21, men wearing masks used cell phones to take photographs or videos while women yelled at them to stop filming. Police were ultimately sent to the scene after shouting and fighting broke out.

outside exit 10 of Gangnam subway station

Meanwhile, a debate has raged of the nature of the incident and the rallies to commemorate the victim at Gangnam Station.

“The women who are leading the commemorations are declaring an act committed by a schizophrenic to be ‘misogyny’ and regarding men in general as potential criminals,” said a man who attended a memorial.

Another man nearby said Gangnam Station “is a place for remembering the victim, but now this is turning into a fight against men and misogyny.”

“A lot of the things written on the memorial notes were just denunciations of men,” the man added.

Kim Ah-yeong, a 26-year-old company employee, said, “An innocent woman lost her life, and now some men are raging about how they ‘never harmed any women.’”

“It seems like they’re angrier about the generalizations about being ‘potential criminals’ than the sympathy or grieving for the victim,” she added.

Throughout South Korea, many are speaking out to remember the victim and oppose misogyny. Hundreds or notes with messages of commemoration were posted on a sculpture near a shopping mall in Busan.

“What were the victim’s dreams?” read one of them.

“I want to live in a world where both men and women are safe,” read another.

Commemorative notes were also reportedly posted on the wall of an exit at Daegu‘s Jungangno subway station and the rear entrance of a department store in Ulsan.

By Park Hyun-chul, staff reporter

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