By Lee Kyung-min
An online platform known for its adult content recently aired a piece in which a man, who identifies himself as broadcast jockey, a live streaming show host, asked a female Chinese tourist to have a drink with him near Hongik University in Seoul, commonly called Hongdae, late at night.
It was apparent that the young woman was not able to fully communicate in Korean, but the man used all sorts of body language to entice her to go with him, and they ended up in a small bar together.
What she might think as a fun, harmless instant date turned into sexual harassment after the man bombarded her with a slew of uncomfortable questions: “Do you know a Korean culture where people have one-night stands?” “Do Chinese people also have one-night stands?” “When was your first (sexual experience)?”
Besides highly misleading remarks on what he claimed to be “Korean culture,” the show turned more salacious from then on.
When the woman was about to kiss the man on his cheek after losing a “game,” the man turned his head and kissed her on the lips. What could very well be considered sexual harassment followed along with more appalling remarks, “Japanese girls are (sexually) open-minded, but Chinese girls are not, which makes my job harder.”
The short footage is only among hundreds of thousands of similar shows available online in Korea, a growing number of which is produced by broadcasters, whose income depends on viewers' attention while streaming them.
Data from the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC) released last month showed the commission imposed administrative measures against 119,665 websites that contained pornography or posts promoting gambling, during the first half of the year, a record number since the commission was established in 2008.
The KCSC blocked access to 83 percent of the websites opened on overseas servers, and 4,141 sites with local servers were permanently shut down. Operators of 15,791 websites were ordered to remove problematic content.
A six-member special unit under the commission, established in April to fight against digital sex crimes, reviews 70 complaints per person per day.
The commission plans to unveil comprehensive measures against broadcasters and online platforms on which they are based in January next year.
The announcement comes amid brewing criticism against the government's inaction to fight the continued rise in the amount of sexual content produced to attract viewers.
In June, the commission held a review for two broadcasters who aired a show of a group of men luring a drunken woman into having sex. The footage shows the faces of the men and the woman until they went into a room. As soon as they began having sexual intercourse, the picture was cut off and only the sound was on.
The commission slapped the broadcasters with a six-month ban from hosting a show, but the measure was far from a punishment, because they can still host any new shows using a new ID and a different website address.
“The government's struggle to regulate digitally produced sexual content will primarily target such platforms through which the content is spread instantly to a wide range of users,” a KCSC official said.