![]() In one criminal case, illegal videos and photos were posted online and accessible for a monthly subscription fee. Once a file is on the internet, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to remove it once and for all. South Korea’s highly digitized society and lightning-fast internet speeds make it easy to circulate illicit footage. Technology and its uses continually outpace political and social reforms. Korea is a society of advanced technology - it boasts some of the most robust internet infrastructure in the world - but it is also a place where custom and tradition have a powerful influence on social norms and public policy. Well into the era of #MeToo, Seo-yeon and her contemporaries found themselves at a crossroads between privacy protection and crime prevention, echoing the many battles that have played out as more governments around the world introduce legislation meant to curb online crime. Sometimes they ended in suicide.Īs Ha Yena, she became part of a small but significant network of people in South Korea who are fighting to prevent digital sex crimes, sometimes at the expense of enacting questionable privacy laws. She went by the nom de guerre Ha Yena for her activist work educating the public and law enforcement about the real-world consequences of those digital crimes: they endangered children, triggered stalking incidents and provoked immense psychological harm. Seo-yeon formed a group called Digital Sex Crimes Out, an organization that, from 2017 through early 2022, sought harsher laws against illegal filming and digital sex crimes in South Korea. Instead, she wanted to find a way to stop these crimes from happening. ![]() Seo-yeon herself never found out what happened to the photos taken of her. Other times they were distributed across social media by embittered former partners. Most often those images and videos were taken by strangers. Some of Seo-yeon’s friends soon became targets of digital sex crimes too, their intimate images leaked online by strangers with pinhole cameras lurking in bathrooms or subway stations or motel rooms. But today, stories about camera installations for illegal filming still make headlines weekly. The country’s now-former president, Moon Jae-in, soon thereafter acknowledged that illegal spy cameras had become “part of daily life.” That same year, thousands took to the streets, demanding legislative action on molka crimes as part of the global #MeToo movement. In 2018, a man was found to possess 20,000 illegally-captured videos when he was arrested for installing spy cameras in motel rooms. This type of covert filming even has its own name: “molka” in Korean, meaning mole camera, referring to both the camera and the footage. Despite years of public outrage and legislative efforts to curb digital sex crimes, the country remains home to a profitable industry that exploits non-consensual images of women, many of them underage, and even coerces them into sexual acts that are filmed and distributed online. Photo by Jeong-mee Yoon.įor many young people in Korea, this story will sound familiar. Three months later, the intruder was arrested and sentenced, but because he was a teenager, he was released on probation without time served. No cameras, no government officials and no law enforcement agency offered much help, even though incidents and attacks like this were becoming more commonplace. Few institutions were available to assist Seo-yeon. But the response was telling.Īt only 17, Seo-yeon had reason to believe that she was the target of a digital sex crime and that the man would publish the photo of her, asleep, on one of the many thousands of sites that publish illegal photographs and videos of women. She later learned that he’d lied to her and shared the video from the incident with the police. But the owner offered little help, telling her there was no such footage. She rushed to the motel owner, urging him to call the police and asking if she could look at closed-circuit surveillance camera footage from the motel manager’s office. “I was very angry because my wallet was there and my money was there, too,” Seo-yeon told me. She figured he had picked the lock or gotten in some other way. She chased him out of the motel into the streets, but he was too fast, disappearing down a sidestreet. Seo-yeon leapt up, and the intruder ran off. He moved the phone from one hand to the other, readying a new angle as Seo-yeon’s partner slept at her side. Seo-yeon Park was lying beside her partner in a motel room near Sinchon, a lively neighborhood in the South Korean capital Seoul, when she was stirred awake by something moving near the foot of her bed.Ī young man was standing over her, his face hidden behind a smartphone.
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