Online sex crimes still thriving despite gov't efforts

By Kim Jae-heun

Government efforts to fight sex crimes on the internet last year have fallen way short of expectations. Voyeur videos are rampant, and the perpetrators are often close acquaintances of the victims, such as boyfriends or girlfriends.

One massive scandal involving a number of male celebrities showed just how such crimes were committed in a casual offhand manner.

Singers Jung Joon-young and Choi Jong-hoon, along with several others, opened a group chat in 2015 to share pictures and videos of them having sex with women, which had been taken without the women's consent.

This scandal among others aroused awareness of online sex crimes and put the issue on the forefront of the government's agenda.

The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family launched a taskforce and support center in 2018 to deal with online sex crimes and help the victims.

The government also ordered all related organizations, including the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) and the National Police Agency (NPA), to cooperate in fighting the crimes.

On Nov. 12, the four organizations signed an agreement to cooperate, establishing hotlines with each forming a 24-hour response team.

However, a KCSC official said that despite the progress made by the organization's response team in charge of deleting websites where illegally filmed clips are shared, it cannot stop abundant website operators from opening other sites.

“There is no concrete data showing how many more websites we need to cut off in order to eradicate the problem because new ones keep being opened,” the KCSC official told The Korea Times under condition of anonymity, Monday. “However, we have increased the personnel working on this by five times and the team shut down 22,900 websites in 2019.”

The KCSC is the only internet monitoring body here that can directly block people's access to harmful websites, and has been doing so under the legal context of the protection of portrait rights since its foundation in February 2008.

In 2016, the KCSC shut down 7,315 websites, but the number jumped to 17,248 in 2018. The sudden increase in the number of “harmful” websites blocked shows how the current administration, which took power in 2017, has taken the issue seriously.

The KCSC official said it is hard to catch the website operators as their IP addresses spaces are usually based in other countries.

In 2017, the KCSC requested American social networking website Tumblr to remove 22,000 pieces of “obscene” content, allegedly involving Koreans, from its platform, but it refused to do so saying it had no obligation to obey Korean law.

According to the Korea Cyber Sexual Violence Response Center's 2018 data, over 40 percent of online sex crime cases occurred through social media platforms.

“Nonetheless, internet service providers such as Google and Facebook have started to cooperate with us by accept our requests to delete harmful websites as they monitor themselves to control obscene content on their platforms,” the KCSC official said.

Meanwhile, the ministry said it helped 1,936 victims of online sex crimes in 2019, more than double the previous year's figure.

“Expanding the taskforce as well as an improvement in the tracking down of criminal material and deleting it has brought results,” the ministry said in a statement. “Operating a hotline between the ministry and the NPA also allowed better teamwork in providing legal support for the victims.”

The ministry said it provided legal support to 44 victims in its investigations of online sex crimes in 2019, up 1.5 times from 25 in 2018.

The spreading of photos or videos showing nudity was the number one crime, followed by illicit filming of sex acts, and disseminating such material. About 24 percent of the crimes were committed by the victims' spouses or intimate partners.

Gender Equality and Family Minister Lee Jung-ok said the types of online sex crimes are diversifying and becoming more complex, which requires immediate action.

“The ministry will cooperate with the KCC, the NPA and the KCSC to form a database to better support the victims,” Lee said.