Currently in South Korea, numerous women are suffering from sexual exploitation and violence due to a series of atrocious digital sex crimes called the “Nth Room”. This is what happened so far.

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At first, criminals sent Twitter messages to the victims saying, “Your private pictures might be leaked on the internet, so please check this website to see if it is really you”. The website was actually a decoy - once the victims clicked the website link, a fake Twitter popped up. Victims thinking that it was the real Twitter typed their username and password, which were immediately shared with the criminals. The shared username and password enabled the criminals to illegally gather more personal informations like telephone numbers, home addresses, and family. 

The online “enslavement” tactics vary. Some traffickers impersonate the police and threaten girls who have posted naked selfies online with prosecution, unless they send them more naked pictures or lewd videos. Some trick their victims into disclosing personal information and threaten to expose them (doxx) online unless the young women or girls become their “slaves” for a week. However, after the week-long “slavery” during which the victims usually send their naked pictures, the pimps possess more material for extortion and the enslavement never ends. Some criminals took women’s personal information by lying that it was a mandatory process for a job interview and some men deliberately shared the personal information of their girlfriends to the criminals to turn them into “slaves” at the “Nth Room”.

If their tactics don’t work, the pimps incite male viewers to punish the resisting females by raping them. According to the korean feminist activists, when a “slave” refuses to cooperate, the exploiters publish her identifying information - place of work, where she lives or goes to school - in chat rooms designed specifically for this purpose. Thus, male members of the chat rooms are incited to find the girl, rape her, record the rape and publish it online. These acts serve three goals: they punish the victim, warn other girls not to follow her path, and provide more lucrative pornographic material to sell, as footage of violent rape is expensive. 

Men exchange links to the chat rooms in private messages, or in South Korean men’s online forums.

The activities recorded included the following: writing “slave” with a knife on the girl’s skin, putting a pair of scissors inside her vagina, cutting off her nipples, making her eat feces, forcing her to have sex with her brother, having her raped by assigned people. The footages of the victims performing such activities are shared at Telegram chatrooms, otherwise called the “Nth Room”.

The age of the victims is diverse; eleven is the youngest victim identified so far. Most of the victims are in their late teens to early twenties. According to a member in the “Nth Room” chatroom, two women/girls become new “slaves” every day. One has alreadly killed herself.

When the footages were collected, criminals under the nicknames “박사" (Baksa) and “갓갓” (Gotgot) and many other accomplices sold the tickets that allow people to enter the Telegram chatrooms where footages of sexual exploitation and violence are shared. The rooms were named 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so on, according to the price of the tickets and the content shared inside. The cost of the tickets varied, and some were as expensive as 1,500 dollars.

It is confirmed that more than 260,000 people have joined the chatrooms. Footages of women and girls getting raped are bought and sold like mere products.

Would reporting to the police work? A man who went inside one of the “Nth Room” chatrooms reported this crime to the Korean police as he was astonished by the brutality. The report was first handed to the Cyber Crime Investigation Unit, but was passed to the Women and Adolescent Crime Investigation Unit, and then to the Violence Investigation Unit, then back to the Cyber Crime Investigation Unit. The investigation was never properly done. The man who originally reported the crime started to contribute to the growth of the “Nth Room” by re-selling the videos, now knowing that punishment for these acts of violence against women was unlikely.

​So far, we have information of just one man charged and sentenced for participating in these crimes. On November 21, 2019, a 31 years old man from Osan was sentenced to jail for possessing 91,890 clips featuring sexual exploitation of adolescents and children as well as for the sale of 2,590 of those clips. However, the judge sentenced him to just one year in prison.

Another evidence of South Korean authorities not taking these crimes seriously presented itself when one of the enslaved women reported the chat rooms to the police. They sent her away, arguing that, as she recorded the videos herself, she couldn’t report a crime.

Right now, South Korean women’s rights activists are trying to raise awareness of the case abroad by a change.org petition. Sadly, just as within their own country, the international media seem to be largely ignoring the case. It is surprising, as around the world, online sexual exploitation and torture of (mostly female) children and young women is growing. 

According to the Internet Watch Foundation which monitors and removes online child pornography, self-generated imagery (or “selfies”) now accounts for nearly a third of web pages featuring sexual images of children. They add that “of the self-generated material featuring girls – be it images or videos - most (80.5%) were aged 11 to 13 years”.

Although this particular flavor of male sexual exploitation is currently limited to South Korea, cases such as the Nth room are bound to happen all over the world. The female sex, no matter the country of origin, is particularly vulnerable to online abuse. Everywhere, girls and young women tend to be less technically savvy than their male counterparts, therefore easier to trick into giving up their private information and explicit images. Due to structural oppression, we also often take risks to escape poverty or abusive situations.

Recently on 17 February 2020, a Korean broadcasting company called SBS took interest in the “Nth Room” and aired their findings through an investigative journalism program called “Curious Stories Y”. A criminal blackmailed the broadcasting company that if they don’t stop airing the program, they are going to force a woman who is a “slave” at the “Nth Room” to kill herself.

To avoid the investigation of the Korean police, the criminals are using Telegram, which has its servers located in foreign lands. Telegram is not an app made in Korea, so it is hard to be investigated by the Korean Police force alone. In addition, the punishment given to criminals who obtain and spread child pornography is too light in South Korea; many criminals only get a short sentence of one year or get released with a suspended sentence.

On 19 March 2020, one of the main criminals under the nickname “Baksa”, a Korean man in his twenties was arrested by the Korean police. The Koreans are demanding the police to reveal his face and punish him harshly through the hashtag - #N번방_박사_포토라인_공개소환.

Many criminals and accomplices of the “Nth Room” are still neither captured nor punished, which makes the “Nth Room” grow rapidly every day, taking life after life. Hence, as a Korean citizen, I would like to call for the joint investigation of international crime investigation agencies like the FBI to help eradicate this inhumane crime. I would also like to ask for human rights organizations and press agencies around the world to pay attention by raising voices and writing articles. Thank you for reading.

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Bonnie Lee doesn’t care about finding a boyfriend or a fairytale wedding, and will decide her own happily-ever-after.

 "I’m a straight woman who is no longer interested in having relationships with men.“  

And she is not alone.

A growing number of South Korean women are banding together to reject rigid patriarchal norms and vowing never to wed, have children or even date and have sex.

“I’ve always felt that as a woman there are more disadvantages than advantages to being married,” says Lee, a 40-something professional who lives with her dog near Seoul.

Observing the reindeer under the aurora | 

The American Psychological Association’s study on the sexualization of girls found that there was amply evidence to conclude that sexualizing girls ‘has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality and attitudes and beliefs’ Some of these effects include more risky sexual behavior, higher rates of eating disorders, depression, and low self-esteem.

These are the same symptoms found in girls and women who have been sexually assaulted; in terms of effect then, we appear to be turning out a generation of girls who have been ‘assaulted’ by the very culture they live in. An there is no avoiding the culture. The very act of socialization in involves internalizing the cultural norms and attitudes. If the culture now is one big collective perpetrator, then we can assume that an ever-increasing number of girls and women are going to develop emotional, cognitive, and sexual problems as they are socialized into seeing themselves and mere sex objects, and not much else.”

So many women reject feminist ideas because it is so damn painful to truly allow themselves to see the nature of the beast, not to mention isolating. Have you ever critiqued men in the presence of a woman deep in patriarchal conditioning? Their reaction can make it so difficult to continue questioning.

This has been a weird week for anyone who is a feminist / evil (depending on which side of “history“ you stand). First you have Keira Bell’s High Court victory regarding the prescription of puberty blockers to minors, then you have Elliot Page coming out as trans while wanging on about people “spewing hostility” with “blood on their hands” (by people, we mean “women”, by “spewing hostility” - “having feminist opinions”, and by “blood on their hands”- “it’s okay to hit them, the bitches”). Anyhow, I’m not going to write much about this, only: Bell is a million times more gender non-conforming than Page could ever hope to be. There is nothing more gender non-conforming than a woman standing up and saying “no” while others demand silence. So, this week’s letter is mainly on violence against women. By which I mean the boring, everyday type, in which women actually die.

The boring dead