‘Spycam porn’ sparks record protests in SKorea

SEOUL: Even a record heatwave will not keep Claire Lee from joining tens of thousands of South Korean women at a mass protest Saturday against secretlyfilmed spycam pornography — as anger over the issue swells, prompting national soul-searching.

Since May, the monthly demonstration in Seoul has shattered records to become the biggest-ever women’s protest in South Korea where the global #MeToo movement has unleashed an unprecedented wave of female-led activism.

The target of their fury: so- called “molka” or spycam videos which largely involve men secretly filming women in schools, offices, trains, toilets and changing rooms and which are so prevalent they make headlines on a daily basis.

“Entering a public bathroom is such an unnerving experience these days,” Lee said, adding that she always looked around the walls to see if there were any “suspicious holes”.

The statistics are startling, with the number of spycam crimes reported to police surging from around 1,100 in 2010 to more than 6,500 last year.

The offenders have included school teachers, professors, doctors, church pastors, government officials, police officers and even a court judge.

In some cases, the victims’ own boyfriends or relatives were responsible for the crimes, in a troubling reflection of South Korea’s deeprooted patriarchal norms.

Fed up of living in fear, women are fighting back.

More than 55,000 attended last month’s protest in Seoul, according to its organisers, although police put the attendance at around 20,000.

Asia’s fourth-largest economy takes pride in its tech prowess, from ultra-fast Internet to cutting- edge smartphones.

But these advances have also given rise to an army of tech-savvy peeping Toms, with videos widely shared in internet chatrooms and on file-sharing sites, or used as adverts for websites promoting prostitution.