Serious digital sex offense issues and sexual crimes in Korea

Dreadful sexual crimes are harassing K-pop female idols these days. Recently, a K-pop female idol was illegally photographed while changing clothes and getting ready for her next stage. Besides, the majority of K-pop female idols are being tricked into pornography via developed technologies such as Deepfake. Deepfake is a type of artificial intelligence used to create synthesis images, audio, and video of a real person. By using this program, the faces of K-pop female idols are being synthesized and abused in sexual exploitation videos. Such material is being exposed and distributed widely through various social media, including Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. Many K-pop female idols are having a hard time with emotional trauma due to these horrifying crimes.

The greater problem is that such crime is not only limited to members of the K-pop female idols, but also any females. People are now creating Deepfake videos with the faces of any woman by illegally using images and videos from public social media accounts. Even though such crimes have seen a drastic increase in number, with the notable “Nth room incident“, people still are not aware of the severity of the crimes. Digital sexual crimes have occurred for a long time in South Korea. Every time people try to raise the voice on this matter, they have faced difficulties due to a lack of public awareness and fewer efforts on helping these victims. The Korean government does not seem to have much willingness to resolve this catastrophic abuse of K-pop female idols.

People are trying hard to raise voices on digital sex offense issues through national petitions and about 360k people have participated so far. There is a standard made by the government that when over 200k people participate in a petition, the government should respond. However, the government and media are not responding nor reacting to this issue yet. People are now reaching out for help via writing letters and emails to the foreign media as well as CNN, BBC, and The New York Times. Moreover, people created the hashtag, #StrongPunishment_for_Deepfake, on Twitter, and make them go to trends so that more people can know about this crime.

It shows an example of recent incidents where crimes are not treated as crimes and many assaulters are not getting enough punishment in South Korea. To resolve this issue, the government must respond to this issue as soon as possible. According to Korea’s law, the assaulters related to this crime should be punished by imprisonment for up to 5 years or a fine of up to 45k dollars. They need our interest and help to prevent further victims.