By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter

The teenager sex trade is rampant in the online world, the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs said Thursday.

A large portion of the trade involves same-sex partners, a phenomenon which seems to be increasing at a fast pace.

The ministry's Central Inspection Bureau (CIB) enforced a crackdown on online teenage sex trade between April and June in which they caught 36 teenagers involved in more than 242 incidents. Alongside, 17 adult males and one broker were caught. The team saw to it that the minors were taken to shelters or to their homes.

Twelve of the 36 were males who had sex with another male in exchange for money or a ``gift.''

According to the bureau, a 16-year-old identified as Song, met a 45-year-old personal chauffer and performed ``indecent acts'' three times inside the driver's car in exchange for a packet of cigarettes. Another 16-year-old named Kang met a 70-year-old cleaning man identified as Jeong and performed similar lewd sexual acts for which he was paid 90,000 won ($90).

Park Eun-jung, a director general of the CIB, did not specify the exact change in the number of the illicit same-sex encounters, but said it had increased as had those who were apprehended.

Park said that most of the men appeared to do sex out of curiosity. ``While juvenile females have sex to get money to cope with financial difficulties after running away from home, the money or goods traded between males were more like a kind of gimmick.''

She added that the cases do not necessarily mean that the persons involved were homosexual. ``Many offenders were married and had families. The only difference we could trace was that they were relatively old but had a sexual appetite they could not control,'' she said.

The ministry also said Internet chatting spaces were mostly used to exchange information or make deals.

A chat site with more than 10 million members nationwide was targeted by the CIB, which said it had monitored thousands of deals being brokered.

The Web site agreed to adopt a better word-screening system and strengthen its monitoring, but said most ``trading'' was done in ``secret chatting windows'' that management could not access without a warrant.

In a bid to combat the juvenile sex trade, the ministry is pushing to revise the Youth Sex Protection Law. Currently a crime is only ``committed'' after sexual intercourse has taken place, which provides a loophole for those trying to entice the under aged. Park said the revision will allow the authorities to punish people who attempt to buy and sell sex from teenagers.

Those forcing young people into prostitution, buying sexual services from them or soliciting another person to buy sex will be heavily fined and sentenced to up to five years in prison.

bjs@koreatimes.co.kr