Government policy lays the groundworkĭigital sex crimes are too widespread to lay the blame at the feet of a handful of bad actors. In other words, a significant percentage of the Korean population believes that female sexuality is the problem – not the sexual violence. Jean Chung/Getty ImagesĪnd yet a 2019 survey conducted by the Korean government found that large swaths of the population blamed women for these sex crimes: 52% said that they believed sexual violence occurs because women wear revealing clothes, while 37% thought if women experienced sexual assault while drunk, they are partly to blame for their victimization. Protests erupted in Seoul in July 2019 after women were drugged and sexually abused at a popular nightclub partly owned by the K-Pop star Seungri. The men would then swap these images in chatrooms. Since sex work and posting nude images of yourself online are illegal in Korea, the women, fearing arrest or being ostracized by friends and family, complied with the perpetrators’ demands to send even more compromising images of themselves. Once they obtained this information, they blackmailed the women by threatening to reveal their sex work and their nudes to their friends and family. The perpetrators either hacked into their social media accounts or approached these women and offered them money, but asked for their personal information so they could transmit the funds. They tended to target poorer women – sex workers, or women who wanted to make a few bucks by sharing anonymous nude photos of themselves. In one, a number of male K-pop stars were indicted for filming and circulating videos of women in group chatrooms without their consent.Ī few months later, Koreans were shocked to learn about what became known as the “ Nth Room Incident,” during which hundreds of perpetrators – mostly men – committed digital sex crimes on dozens of women and minors. In 2019, there were two major incidents that involved digital sex crimes. In 2018, there were 2,289 reported cases of digital sex crimes in 2021, the number snowballed to 10,353. These are newer forms of sexual violence facilitated by technology: revenge porn upskirting, which refers to surreptitiously snapping photos under women’s skirts in public and the use of hidden cameras to film women having sex or undressing. However, none of these events have elicited as much public controversy as the steep rise in digital sex crimes. The two groups violently clashed during competing protests at the site of the murder. On the other side were men who claimed that it was merely the isolated actions of a mentally ill man. On one side were feminists, who saw misogyny as the underlying motive. He was eventually sentenced to decades in prison, but the lines were quickly drawn. Its goal was to fight back by demeaning Korean men in ways that mirrored the rhetoric on sites like Ilbe.Ī year later, a man who had professed his hatred of women murdered a random woman in a public bathroom near a Seoul subway station. Then in 2015, an online extremist feminist group named Megalia arose. In 2010, Ilbe, a right-wing website that traffics in misogyny, started attracting users who peppered the forums with vulgar posts about women. Over the past couple of decades, there have been flash points in this gender war. One enraged Korean man commented that I was an “ugly feminist.”īut this was tame in comparison to what women living in South Korea have endured in recent years. But some Korean readers thought that I was simply criticizing Korean men for not being romantic and handsome enough. The article was about racial politics and the masculine ideals. I pointed out that since the tourists’ fantasies were based on fictional characters, some of them ended up disappointed with the Korean men they dated in real life. The article described foreign women who traveled to Korea after becoming enamored of the idea of dating Korean men from watching Korean television dramas.
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