12,000 women demand 'fair investigation' for all spy-cam cases
More than 12,000 protesters urge police to investigate fairly all crimes involving spy cams near the Hyehwa Station in Seoul, Saturday. / Yonhap
By Jung Da-min, Jung Min-ho
More than 12,000 people, mostly young women, gathered in Seoul, Saturday, to call on police to investigate fairly all crimes involving spy cams, claiming that police tended to “speed up” when the victims were men.
Wearing red as a symbolic color of their fury, the protesters chanted, “Women are also citizens of Korea,” in the largest women's rights rally in recent memory.
Earlier this month, a female model was arrested for allegedly photographing a male colleague naked without his knowledge while he was posing for university art students and uploading it online.
After the alleged incident was revealed, police immediately began investigating and arrested the suspect within less than a week.
Many women were surprised by the speed of the process. They complained that police had never responded to female victims of such crimes, such as “revenge porn,” in the same way.
They said a simple Google search would show the faces of many female victims that police had long ignored.
“The police obviously could do it, but they didn't (properly investigate all such cases),” a woman said during the rally.
Protesters said police took 17 years to shut down SoraNet, a notorious adult file-sharing website whose users were mostly male, but took only a few days to begin investigating Womad, a radical feminism site, where the male model's nude photo was posted and ridiculed.
Before the rally started, a member of Ilbe, an online misogynist group, tried to photograph the protesters in an apparent attempt to disturb them.
On the Cheong Wa Dae website, a petition for “equal justice” has garnered more than 400,000 signatures in 10 days.