[The Editors' Verdict] The Law That Created Cho Ju-bin

The earliest memory of digital sex crimes dates back to 1998. Two years later, there was an incident with even worse criminal nature. At that time, Korean men watched the video featuring a Miss Korea actress and a famous singer without much guilt. Although they knew the victims' lives were being destroyed, there was a widespread attitude that it was justified because the victims "deserved it." This social atmosphere was concretized by punishing the two victims?not the video producers, distributors, or viewers?with the penalty of "quitting their jobs and not appearing in public."

The incident also had a significant impact on the perpetrators' lives. One used the notoriety gained after the incident to enter broadcasting and publishing fields. He was not punished because he was not directly responsible for distributing the video. The second perpetrator was judged by the law eight years after the incident. However, the name of the law applied to him and the sentence he received show that the judgment was not a condemnation of an act that destroyed a person’s character and caused irreversible wounds. The laws applied were the Framework Act on Telecommunications and the Crime of Manufacturing Obscene Materials, with a prison sentence of four years. There has been no news that the group of perpetrators who searched for, copied, and distributed the video were punished or apologized to the victims.

Our society’s mistake of punishing the victims instead of the perpetrators is related to legal shortcomings, which remain valid today. It is now common knowledge that the degree of violence digital videos can inflict on humans is by no means less than that of physical contact sex crimes. However, our laws fail to fully capture the evolving forms and complex nature of digital sex crimes. It is clear that this legal gap contributed to the emergence of essentially the same incidents, from Sora’s guide and the webhard cartel to the Jung Joon-young KakaoTalk chatroom and the n번방 (Nth Room) case.

The violence of physical contact sex crimes fundamentally comes from the perpetrator who committed the act. In contrast, digital sex crimes affect victims through every single click accessing the video, not only production and distribution. There is no difference in the degree of violence between the first perpetrator and the 15,000th perpetrator.

The representative law punishing sex crimes is the "Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment, etc. of Sexual Violence Crimes." However, as is well known, there are practical barriers to applying this law to those who watch or save illegal recordings in online spaces like the n번방 or similar platforms. This law does not punish simple possession if the victim is an adult, even if the video was recorded without consent. If the victim is a child or adolescent, possession is punishable, but only with imprisonment of up to one year or a fine of up to 20 million won. Even for child and adolescent obscene materials, simple viewers are not subject to punishment.

The reality of punishing those who clearly committed sexual violence with relatively light laws weakens the sense of guilt for accessing illegal obscene materials. The fact that there was a group of 15,000 perpetrators in the chatrooms sharing sexually exploitative videos proves this, and such a huge market will repeatedly throw monsters like Cho Ju-bin into our society.

The legal attempt to establish the concept and types of digital sex crimes following the n번방 incident is a welcome development. Voices calling for not only supplementing existing laws but also enacting separate legislation specialized for digital sex crimes are gaining strength. Establishing an appropriate legal system to control the increasingly destructive evolution of digital sex crimes will be the only way to offer sincere apologies to the countless victims, including the two women from over 20 years ago, whom our community and laws have failed to protect.

Chief of Social Affairs Shin Beom-su

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.