In March 2020, the “Nth Room,” was ranked as the top searched item on Naver search. The Nth Room case is about the brutal online sexual violence against more than 70 women, including underage girls. The victims were threatened and then forced to take sexually exploitative pictures and videos of themselves. Unfortunately, digital sex crimes such as on Nth Room did not just begin recently. Sexual abuse online started after we improved the quality of life through technological developments such as high speed network and increased growth of smart phone ownership. At that time, people didn’t exactly know the seriousness and size of the problem. That indifference is a cause for today’s brutal online sexual abuse, the Nth Room case.
How Have Digital Sex Crimes Continued Today?
“I will bring the ‘Soranet’ back.” This is a statement a person in the Nth room wrote in a chatroom with other participants. Soranet was once the largest pornography site in Korea, established in 1999, that had offered illegal pornographic material such as secretly filmed videos and revenge porn. The manager who controlled the website was arrested and finally Soranet was closed in June 2016. After the site closure, other websites such as “ABsnoop” and “Darkweb,” which are similar to Soranet, appeared. However, the managers of these other websites were arrested, and their sites were shut down as well. So, the people who enjoyed illegal porn in secrecy created a new routine of sharing videos through social media sites such as Telegram and Twitter.
The Telegram app is where Nth Room sexual abuse started. Telegram has the strength of anonymity, and these people abused that anonymity and resurrected the 2nd version of Soranet. They created different chat rooms to share illegal porn and named each room as the ‘1st room’ or ’2nd room’ and so on. After the number of room continued to grow, they labeled the whole chat group the "Nth Room.” People in this chat shared the videos they had, and each chat room was controlled by different managers. About the same time, another chat room known as “Doctor Room” was created. This room was organized by a manager called, “Doctor.” The Doctor Room was divided into three different rooms, each with a different level of sexual stimulation content and each room required different entrance fees. This March, managers of both the Nth Room and the Doctor Room were arrested and both rooms were closed.
The Nth Room Case?
The Nth Room case has shocked Korean media and society. This case started with what are known as “Deviation Accounts” on Twitter. Deviation accounts are secrete Twitter accounts which were created by people who enjoy uploading pictures of their naked body without their faces being shown. Managers from Nth room targeted these women. They then sent a link to those girls and told them, “Pictures and videos of you naked have been posted on this site, please go and check if it’s you or not.” The link redirected girls into a fake Twitter page. As they input their personal log-in information, their private information was exposed to those who would abuse them and sell their photos and videos, the ‘pimps’. These girls’ disastrous lives were about to begin. The pimps threatened the girls and forced them to take pictures of themselves naked with their faces exposed. As time went on, the level of wickedness became much more serious. People in the chat room dehumanized the female victims by treating them like slaves and making films of the girls being raped by the managers. For example, people in the chat forced the victims to bark like dogs and lie naked on public toilet floors. However, a more surprising fact is that about 16 of the 70 victims were teenage girls. In the videos shared in Nth room, little girls were crying for help, but no one in the chat room listened to them or cared.
After the personal identity of Cho Ju Bin, the manager of Doctor Room, was disclosed, many people were shocked because Cho looked like an ordinary 20-year-old boy. According to the prosecution’s investigation, Cho was an ordinary university student who volunteered for people in need and wrote an article about sexual assault prevention. Sex crimes are not always committed by people who look creepy or vicious. Those people in the Nth room might seem to be ordinary people just like Cho, but they committed inexcusable crimes through the dark, secret side of their character.
What is the Basic Problem of Digital Sexual Violence?
The seed of this crime sprouted when people were able to access pornography easily online. Before, people had to pay to watch porn at specific websites. As technology developed however, the average person could easily share videos by uploading them online illegally. As a result, websites offered sexual videos at no cost to increase the number of viewers. This is not to say that watching porno in itself is bad, but easy access to online porn can make people insensitive and they don’t realize that they are themselves participating in these vicious sex crimes by watching the videos. They are creating the demand for more videos. Rape is an irrefutable sexual crime, but watching and spreading videos of a person being raped for personal benefit or pleasure should also obviously be illegal and prohibited. This immoral behavior should be common sense that everyone must not participate in. However, there are people who do not care about the difference between pornography and online sexual violence. They only care about their own gratification. As a result, they are still distributing digital sex crime, which is flourishing online.
Another problem are the misconceptions created by weak education and light punishments. Compared to other sex crimes, digital sexual violence has a perception of being less vicious. This is proven by the fact that the managers who supervised Soranet, AVsnoop, and Darkweb were only imprisoned for 3 to 4 years as their punishment for sharing online sexual violence. Crime is crime. There is no bad crime or good crime. But the continuous poor treatment on digital sexual abuse inculcated wrong thoughts such as, ‘I can’t be a bad person by just watching illegal porn.’ Not only the light punishment, but the application scope of the law is also small. Nowadays, people who organize illegal porn sites get punished, but there is no action against the people who watch the videos online. As time passes, the complacency of ‘I won’t be punished by watching the videos’ has been implanted in people’s mind and it has made them continue to contribute to online sex crimes.
How can we Solve these Problems?
To prevent more lurid crimes, it is essential to provide better sex education and have an appropriate punishment system. Through the Nth room investigation, people noticed that teenagers also contributed to the crime. This April, another manager of the Doctor room, Budda, was arrested and he is now 20 years old which means he was a teenager when he committed the crime. By knowing that, it becomes clear that our education can’t keep up with the development of technology. To improve our society, adding new sex education classes about digital sex crime in the official education program is necessary. It is important to study required courses, but it is also important to provide proper sex education and teach young people to not abuse sex. Furthermore, the punishment system for online sex crimes should be toughened. According to the exemption law related to digital sex crimes, people who upload or share sexual content without permission would be sentenced to 2 years in prison. However, people are starting to notice how serious online sex crimes are and they are making changes. For Cho, who organized the Doctor Room, the prosecution stated that Cho will receive lifetime imprisonment as punishment. In addition, they shouldn’t just strengthen the punishment of offenders, but penalties for all people who watch illegal videos also needs to be enacted. By making some significant changes to the laws, we can protect more people from online sexual violence.
Sex crime such as Nth Room case must stop now. This kind of poison spread through misconception from long time ago. From now on, we should correct the wrong things through appropriate education and improving criminal system. This might allow every person to live in a safer environment and society.
SooAh Lee victorahhhnn@gmail.com
<저작권자 © 홍익대영자신문사, 무단 전재 및 재배포 금지>
