“Molka”: The new sexual “nightmare” of women in South Korea

The online sexual abuse affecting South Korea, has devastating consequences for victims, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

“Molka”, the use of hidden tiny cameras to capture nude images without their consent, and their subsequent sharing, causes deep psychological trauma to the victims and strong fear in a large part of the female population of the country.

The 96-page report, “My Life is Not Your Porn: Digital Sex Crimes in South Korea,” found that despite legal reforms, women and girls targeted by digital sex offenders often face police indifference. and courts.

“Criminal justice officials – most of whom are men – often seem to simply not understand or accept that these are very serious crimes,” said Heather Barr, interim director for women’s rights at Human Rights Watch. author of the report.

The report was based on 38 interviews and an online survey involving hundreds of women.

In 2008, less than 4% of sex crimes prosecutions in South Korea involved illegal filming. By 2017, the number of such cases had increased elevenfold, from 585 to 6,615, accounting for 20% of sexual assault prosecutions. Initially, authorities focused on the use of miniature cameras (“spycams”) to secretly record material in places such as toilets, locker rooms and hotels.

Targeted women and girls face significant obstacles to justice. Police often refuse to accept their allegations by downplaying the incidents, accusing the women and conducting inappropriate investigations. As cases progress, survivors often find it difficult to obtain information about their cases and have their voices heard in court.

In 2019, prosecutors filed 43.5% of digital sex crimes, compared to 27.7% of homicide cases and 19% of robbery cases. Judges often impose low sentences – in 2020, 79% of people convicted of taking personal photos without consent received a suspended sentence, a fine or a combination of the two. 52% received only suspended sentences. The problems faced by women in the justice system are exacerbated by the lack of women police officers, prosecutors and judges.

Civil remedies, such as a court order that obliges the guilty party to delete the images or pay compensation to the victim, are not readily available. When a civil action is brought on the basis of facts which are also the subject of a criminal prosecution, it is common practice to adjourn the civil action until the completion of the criminal case. This means that women can not ask for help during the period when they may need it most.

Filing a civil lawsuit would also require victims to provide their names and addresses, making this information available to the public, including the person who committed the crime, something few women feel comfortable doing.

“Digital sex crimes have become so common in South Korea that they affect the quality of life of all women and girls,” Barr said. “Women and girls have told us that they avoid using public toilets and feel anxious about hidden cameras in public places, even in their homes. “A worrying number of survivors of digital sex crimes have said they had considered suicide,” he added.

According to the report, the South Korean government and National Assembly have taken some important steps in recent years to reform the law and provide services to people experiencing digital sex crimes – largely in response to the mass protests by activists in 2018. However, these measures are still inadequate, in part because they have failed to address the deep forms of gender inequality that fuel and smooth out digital sex crimes. In the ranking of the World Economic Forum for the 2021 Global Gender Gap, South Korea ranked 102nd among 156 countries, with the largest gap in economic participation and opportunities of any advanced economy.

The gender pay gap in South Korea is 32.5%. Sexual violence is widespread – in a 2017 survey of 2,000 South Korean men, almost 80% of respondents admitted to having abused their partners – compared to global estimates that one in three women has been abused. The National Sex Education Curriculum, published in 2015, has been widely criticized for perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes.

“The root cause of digital sex crimes in South Korea is the widely accepted harmful views and attitudes towards women and girls that the government urgently needs to address,” Barr said. “Although the government has changed some things in the law, it has not sent a clear and strong message that women and men are equal and that misogyny is unacceptable.”

Some examples mentioned in the report

Park Ji-young (pseudonym) discovered on her boyfriend’s cell phone photos of women who had been secretly taken in public. She later gained access to his cloud storage, where she found 40-50 photos of other sexual partners including four of her own. She tried to find the other women in the photos, but her ex-boyfriend threatened her. She went to the police but a lawyer who had hired to help her repeatedly urged her to withdraw the complaint. She found another lawyer, but before the case was sent to the prosecutor, she received a phone call from a detective, who told her that if she did not agree to an out-of-court settlement, her ex-boyfriend’s lawyer would ask her to be prosecuted for defamation and illegal access to her ex-boyfriend’s files.

It was 1 in the morning of 2018 and Jieun Choi was trying to fall asleep when her doorbell started ringing repeatedly. When she opened the door, she saw a police officer who informed her that a man was filming her through her window, from the roof of a nearby building. The man told police he had been videotaping her for two weeks. When police obtained a warrant and confiscated the perpetrator’s electronic equipment, they found that he had collected images of seven other women, and Jieun Choi later learned that he had been charged with the same crime several years earlier. He was sentenced to suspension.

After Lee Ye-rin rejected her married employer’s sexual proposal, he gave her a watch. She put the clock in her bedroom, but later discovered that it was a spy camera and that he was watching her for a month and a half. “It simply came to my notice then. “Sometimes I feel terrified for no reason in my own room,” she said. A year later, he was still taking medication for depression and anxiety.

Sohn Ji-won was 16 when she met someone on the internet through a site that randomly connects people to chat. “I was going through difficult times, so maybe I needed someone I could count on,” he said. He asked her to send him nude photos of her. She sent them but then regretted it and tried to delete them. He reacted violently. She met other men on the Telegram app – who pressured her to send them nude photos of her, telling her they would delete them immediately – only to find one of those photos later, posted in a group chat.

In 2017, Oh Soo-jin was a 20-year-old student looking for a part-time job. She agreed to pose naked as part of a modeling job, as both the job advertisement and the contract she signed explicitly stated that all photos would be personal and that any notification of them was strictly prohibited. The young woman resigned when the studio owner demanded more nude photos. In July 2019, more than 700 photos of her appeared on a website, available for purchase. He went to the police, but the post did not come down and more appeared. “I am afraid for my future,” she said. “It will always be on someone’s computer and I do not know when it will stop. So I thought, “If this can not be stopped, then I want to end my life.”

The posts – hundreds of them, for several months – appeared on sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Torrent, YouTube, Instagram, Naver Blog, Naver Cafe, Daum blog, Daum cafe and Google photos. One day, two unknown men appeared in Kang Yu-jin’s office. “There were men who wanted to get in touch with me at the church where my parents went and there were men who texted me asking for sex,” he said. The young woman was forced to quit her job and leave her home for good.

source: hrw.org