A 38-year-old man addicted to pornography was given a hefty prison term for raping his daughter, the latest in a string of unnerving sex crimes in Korean society.
The Busan District Court on Tuesday sentenced the father, whose identity was withheld, to seven years in prison for raping his 13-year-old daughter in August 2010 and again in February 2011.
The court also ordered that his personal information be made available to the public for 10 years and that he wear an electronic monitoring anklet for five years.
Along with hundreds of child porn images on his computers, the defendant had explicit materials involving incest and bestiality, and video footage of his daughter sleeping on his cell phone, court records showed.
"The defendant committed a crime against humanity, inflicting unbearable mental suffering on his daughter," the court said in a ruling. "The court handed down a heavy punishment because instead of showing remorse for his crime, he maintains innocence, saying that his daughter is lying."
The ruling came amid growing calls for tougher punishment for sex offenders and stronger preventive measures, including launching more active crackdowns on child pornography as it was revealed that a suspect in the Naju case also frequently watched the explicit material.
Police on Monday vowed to punish not only child pornography distributors and producers, but also those who download the explicit material from Web sites.
Also, the government on Tuesday said it is seeking to expand chemical castration to include those convicted of sex crimes against minors under 19 and to fully make public the home addresses of sex offenders subject to information disclosure. (Yonhap)