By Hyejung Park

The nth room case has shocked the public in South Korea and worldwide. It is revealed that men used Telegram chat rooms called nth rooms to share videos and pictures that contained sexual abuse of women and girls. Chat room users’ numbers are estimated to be about 260,000 and at least 74 women including 16 underage girls were tricked or blackmailed into sharing sexually degrading images of themselves. Some men paid 1,200$ to enter high-ranked chat rooms.

In an article published by The Organization for World Peace that covered this case, Isha Tembe argued that in order to solve this issue, ‘social stigma around sex and the industry of sex-work’ should be removed. It is not new that liberal feminists or lefties advocate for sexual exploitation under the name of ‘sex work’ and falsely blame social stigma for violence in the sexual exploitation industry, but applying this approach to this case is appalling on many levels.

First of all, this case is a clear example that shows why we should connect pornography or prostitution to sexual exploitation rather than dividing the two and treating them differently. In the nth room case, chat room users called the videos Yadong, which means porn in Korean, where victims were forced to act like a dog, to insert worms into their own genitals, or to perform masturbation in front of a camera. The men called these victims ‘slaves’ and found pleasure in forcing the women and girls to sexually degrade themselves and in making them beg for the men’s mercy. Although these acts by men can be categorized as sexual crime under the law, users treated the images just as porn. In an interview, the Team Flame, which consists of two female college students who started investigating these chat rooms in July 2019 and greatly contributed to exposing this case to the media and the public, explained that misogyny lies at the heart of this case. They said ‘it’s about objectifying women and not treating them as equal beings. It’s a fundamental trait of all the participants’. The process of grooming the victims into sharing their naked pictures is also very similar to pimps’ tricks to lure women into prostitution. One of the ways the men used for the nth rooms was approaching girls, saying they can offer high-paying part-time jobs, and asking for a partly-naked picture of the women. Eventually perpetrators used the victims’ personal information and pictures to blackmail them. Using women’s psychological, economic vulnerability to lure them into sexual exploitation is the most common method used in the prostitution industry. As a former counsellor for prostituted women, I have witnessed this kind of situation numerous times.

Thankfully, women’s organizations that are responding to this case – National Solidarity Against Sexual Exploitation of Women and Korea Cyber Sexual Violence Response Center, to name a few – saw through the nature of this case and named it ‘Telegram sexual exploitation case’.  Advised by these organizations, the media is also calling the materials shared in the chat rooms ‘videos of sexual exploitation’.

South Korea’s feminist movement has potent history of fighting against prostitution and sexual exploitation since 1970s when women’s organizations started criticising kisaeng (geisha) tourism in which Japanese white collar men travelled to Korea and used South Korean women as hostesses. After tragic fire accidents that took many women’s lives at red-light district establishments in which they were locked up as prostitutes in debt bondage, Korea passed an anti-prostitution law, in 2004, tightening punishment for ‘buying sex’ and operating brothels. In addition to this tradition of abolitionist movement in Korea, the powerful radical online feminist movement that emerged in 2015 made online sexual violence and exploitation noticed by the public. The biggest women-only rallies against spy cam in 2018 gathered 350,000 women in total to the streets and showed the society how serious this issue was. These women have been working very hard to make the nth room case taken seriously by the police and the media. They investigated the chat rooms themselves risking their own safety, tracked down perpetrators and handed the information they found to the media, and launched sophisticated campaigns to make this case more visible on Twitter, Facebook and etc.

One of the things they demanded most arduously to the police was to release the identities of the suspects. Started by the women, the petition to the President urging disclosure of the names and photos of the suspects gathered over 2 million signatures online. Subsequently the Personal Information Disclosure Review Committee of Seoul Police made a decision to disclose Cho Joo-bin, the main suspect’s identity. Public exposure of the perpetrators is known to be the most feared punishment for sexually exploiting women, according to a research that interviewed ‘sex buyers’.

Contrary to Tembe’s argument, in order to decrease sexual exploitation, we need to put more stigma on men paying to use women for sexual gratification. We have not stigmatised enough men who use women’s vulnerable state for sexual gratification through prostitution and pornography to deter them. South Korean women are now demanding the police to disclose identities of all the men who entered the nth rooms and they are targeting the exact driving force of these heinous crimes. Instead of protecting men’s right to sexually exploit women in the name of lifting stigma around ‘sex work’,  we need to recognise that what harms prostituted or sexually exploited women is actual verbal, physical, sexual violence and degradation toward women, not the social stigma.