Identity politics and victim ideology poison everything. Feminists in South Korea are stunned to learn that portable recording devices exist and might be used to surreptitiously record them while they’re drunk. And thus, a ‘spycam porn epidemic’ is born.
Hasn’t everyone heard of cameras that look like lighters, flashes of light inside nooks and crannies at a public restroom, subway up skirting? On June 9, 30,000 women gathered in South Korea to say it’s time to panic! It could happen to anyone! Patriarchy! Womyn unite!
The demonstration in Hyehwa, Seoul, was the biggest women’s rally thus far in South Korean history (seconded only by the same organizer’s first rally on May 19).
“It was bound to happen,” said Ha Yena, 21, referring to the massive protests.
One night in Seoul last year, Ha went to a motel alone after an evening of drinking with friends. In the middle of her sleep, she felt something on her legs. She woke up, opened her eyes, and in the dark, saw a man who looked to be in his twenties. His hands were on her legs, trying to part them. His face was illuminated by a glowing white light — emitted by a phone. Ha remembers her mind going blank. She was only able to stutter, “Who are you?”
Ha says she found herself a victim of ‘spycam porn’ in production. Recording others without consent, then circulating the images as pornographic materials, is a widespread problem in South Korea.
Mobile phones aren’t the only tool; spy cameras, small enough to be hidden in everyday objects, are easy for anyone to buy, both on- and offline. By police estimates, there have been over 6,000 spycam cases each year between 2013 to 2017.
The participants at the Hyehwa protests — activists and ordinary citizens backed by a Twitter army — were condemning the continuing availability of spycam porn and what they maintain is a double standard on the part of the police.
Having no understanding of supply and demand, the protesters complained that spycam videos are often accepted by South Korean internet users, mostly male, as a ‘natural’ genre of porn (as opposed to the more contrived, studio-made variety).
The protesters were also criticizing what they say is “structural sexism behind the justice system,” according to a press release from the organizers, Women March for Justice.
They point to the recent spycam case at Hongik University: In May, a woman was arrested for secretly filming and distributing an image of a male nude model. The woman, surnamed Ahn, was made to stand in front of the media, albeit wearing a mask. This was perceived by many women as a case demonstrating police bias. Why was this case handled so swiftly, while so many others perpetrated by men aren’t? Why did police parade the female perpetrator, while so many male perpetrators escape public scrutiny?
“I was so shocked,” said Ha, who now runs Digital Sexual Crime Out (DSO), an NGO that tracks spycam footages online and provides assistance to victims. Blissfully ignorant that the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’, Ha continued, “I’ve seen a spycam case where the woman was being blackmailed by a man, and the police still didn’t arrest him.”
Arrests do happen, however. Between 2012 and 2017, out of the nearly 20,924 male suspects, 2.6 percent — around 540 — were placed under detention. (To compare, out of the 523 female suspects in the same time period, four were detained.)
Statistically, it’s hard to prove that police provide preferential treatment to male victims — whether in the number of arrests or the speed of reaction.
“It’s unthinkable that police would slow down investigations depending on the gender,” Lee Jumin, the head of the National Police Agency, said at a press conference.
One Response
Is this article written by you, or reproduced? If written, when you make a statement about something being difficult to prove, provide the more easily found statistic that demonstrates that the point would be hard to prove. It’s standard news item practice. Otherwise, you are expecting us to just take your word for it, when the article’s title indicates that you believe the evidence obviously points a certain way.