The Women’s Human Rights Institute of Korea (WHRIK) hosted various forums on different forms of gender-based violence in the month of November: ▲ prostitution through internet websites, ▲ sex crimes after breaking and entering, ▲ digital sex crimes, and ▲ ICT mediated domestic violence.
The ‘Anti-Prostitution Policy Forum’ was held on the 8th at the National Assembly Research Service (NARS) to discuss the topic of ‘the problem and solution of prostitution on the internet.’ Keynote speaker, professor Park Chan-geol of Daegu Catholic University, explained that “with the ever-changing and more intelligent forms of prostitution, there is an urgent need for nationwide action against prostitution using IT and the internet ... the current laws punishing prostitution is insufficient to deal with new and variant forms of prostitution; thus further groundwork is needed to implement new regulating policies.” At this forum, Daejeon’s District Police Agency reported on their crackdown of the major online prostitution site ‘Night War’ and how they were able to successfully arrest 36 people involved in the crime and close down the site. Inspector Hong Young-sun of Daejeon District Police Agency’s Cyber Investigation Team explained that “there is a way to block the prostitution website domain,” and that “among harmful websites that need to be blocked, those that contain information regarding ‘sexual violence’ and ‘prostitution’ must be singled out as ‘urgent targets for block,’ and follow up on whether the block was successful, checking up on ISP etc, by keeping a separate and dedicated staff to continuously check and manage these websites.”
During the ‘2019 International Conference on Digital Sex Crimes’ on November 15, ways in which to support victims of digital sex crimes were discussed. Key presentations included case studies from the U.S., Australia, England, and South Korea, followed by a discussion on legal actions against illegal footage recorded without consent or other harmful videos, as well as Twitter Korea’s action policy against digital sex crimes.
Sources
Kim, Suh-hyun. Main Issues on Women this week. The Women’s News (Nov. 11, 2019)
Noh, Ji-min. Can prostitution ‘reviewers’ be punished? Inadequate grounds to punish prostitution online site managers. Media Today (Nov. 9, 2019)
Jin, Hye-min. More than 40 sites imitating ‘Night War’ but National Assembly is indifferent…. revisions on prostitution laws still zero. The Women’s News (Nov. 8, 2019)
* The article which is written in Korean is attached in this post as a PDF file.
** Translation by Yonjoo Hong.
