hankyoreh

Heather Barr

By Heather Barr, interim co-director of women’s rights at Human Rights Watch

A new Human Rights Watch report on South Korea has documented how, even in the wake of shocking cases like the Nth Room case, major gaps remain in the government’s response to digital sex crimes.

Lee Ye-rin’s job had been going well, but then her boss started making sexual advances toward her. He was married; she was not interested. Then he gave her a gift — a clock. She put it in her room, but the light bothered her, so she kept moving it. “But every time I moved the clock, he called me,” she said. “I found it strange, so I googled the clock and found it was a special kind.”

Lee Ye-rin found the clock for sale online with a description explaining that it was a “spycam” with a tiny camera inside that streamed footage to a linked smartphone — her boss’s smartphone. “After I googled it, I called him,” Lee Ye-rin said. “I said, ‘This is not an ordinary clock,’ and he confessed. He said, ‘Is that the thing you stayed up all night to google?’ That means he was watching me.”

Getting help was difficult. The police interrogated Lee Ye-rin for four hours, asking inappropriate questions, like whether she had ever done anything in her room someone shouldn’t see. No one explained what was likely to happen with the court case or how she could come to court and have her voice heard.

She experienced long-lasting trauma. “I cried all night, I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I took medicine to calm myself. What happened took place in my own room — so sometimes, in my daily life, I feel terrified without reason.”

Tech-facilitated abuses against women and girls are a problem all over the world but are particularly widespread and severe in South Korea. The South Korean government has taken some steps in addressing the problem — because thousands of women protesters took to the streets in 2018 and forced it to act.

But the problem has not been solved by any means. Illegal filming — including by spycams in locations like public toilets — and sharing images without consent or faking them has become so common and feared in South Korea that it is having a broad impact on women and girls, even those who have not knowingly been targeted.

The criminal legal system responds poorly to these cases. Police—the majority of whom are men — too often mock and belittle victims, turn away their complaints, compel them to collect all the evidence themselves, interrogate them in abusive ways, and even pass illegal images around the station house for their own entertainment. Prosecutors often drop cases. Even when cases result in conviction, survivors are frustrated by sentences that they feel are minor compared to the harm they experienced.

Civil remedies — the chance to get an urgent court order compelling someone to delete or stop spreading images or pay damages to a victim or for the removal of illegal images — should be a crucial tool for survivors. But in South Korea these remedies are not readily available because of limited access to legal assistance, the expectation that such a case should wait until the end of a criminal trial, and the risk that filing a suit will result in your identity and contact details being disclosed to the perpetrator.

The South Korean government has established a center specifically tasked with assisting survivors — helping them obtain legal and mental health assistance and seek removal of harmful material from the internet. This center should be a model for other countries, but it is still too little and spread too thin.

The most fundamental failing by the South Korean government is its failure to tackle the social attitudes and gender inequity that normalize and encourage digital sex crimes. The education system does not teach enough about sexuality and fails to combine teaching about consent and healthy relationships with teaching good digital citizenship. Sexist attitudes persist — such as telling girls that they should be flattered if a boy wants to take or even share images of them or that it is their fault because of how they dressed or behaved. Many lawmakers and government officials, most of them male, don’t understand that crimes perpetrated through technology have very real consequences for women and girls.

We lead growing proportions of our lives online, and this is even more true for young people, who face the daunting task of exploring their sexuality and relationships in an increasingly digital world. Lawmakers and the government in South Korea are way behind in understanding how to prevent and respond to gender-based violence using tech and in online spaces. It’s past time for them to catch up.

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]