In commemoration of Anti-prostitution Week (September 19th through the 25th every year), the Citizens’ Coalition for Democratic Media (hereafter CCDM), a citizen journalism group, announced the results of monitoring all news articles on prostitution. CCDM explained that most journalists used the term “prostitution of youth” and portrayed youth victims of sexual exploitation as criminals or juvenile delinquents, rather than using the term “sexual exploitation” to delineate the issue. The main results of the monitoring can be organized as below:
(1) While a keyword search for “sexual exploitation of youth” resulted in 256 articles, a search for “youth prostitution” found 3,728 articles.
☞ The term “youth prostitution” must be replaced with “sexual exploitation of children and youth”
(2) In monitoring all news articles including the term “youth prostitution,” many of them conveyed a simple and fragmented message that “youths were using prostitution as bait to extort and assault adults.”
☞ youth targeted for prostitution are in many cases dismissed as criminals; but various, multi-layered causes such as social polarization or domestic, school, and sexual violence play a role in leading youth to prostitution
(3) Some reports even provide sex buyers with information on how they can evade the law.
☞ the media must play the role of bringing forth a ‘social consensus’ to require proper punishment on the perpetrators and provide sufficient support for victims
(4) The necessity for the media to play its role in carrying out what is stipulated in Article 19 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by the ROK government in 1991, ‘to protect the child from all forms of exploitation including sexual abuse.’
Source
Cho, Sun-hee. News Monitoring Report ? Stop the click stores using children and youth as bait for prostitution. Citizens’ Coalition for Democratic Media (Sept 24, 2019)
* Translation by Yonjoo Hong
** The article which is written in Korean is attached in this post as a PDF file.