were ‘School MeToo,’ ‘feminism,’ ‘spy cams,’ and ‘hatred,’ often used in the context of misogyny.” As women find their voices in South Korea, it becomes imperative that the country move past its current manner of tolerating these crimes simply because boys will be boys. Korea’s difficulty in implementing a sound legal structure that protects its women may not be in legislative failure, but in its failure to truly shed a persisting history of misogyny and patriarchy.Īccording to Twitter Korea, in 2018, “the top four social issues discussed. Women earn less than 70% of what men earn in terms of wage. The OECD, in its 2018 glass-ceiling index, noted South Korea as one of the worst countries to be a working woman in. South Korea has one of the highest gender wage gaps among twenty-nine developed nations tracked by the OECD. This inherent failing in the criminal justice system is often attributed to the patriarchal underpinnings of South Korean society. “Filming or distributing intimate videos without consent can each be punished with up to five years’ jail, but analysts say many often end up with only a suspended sentence or a fine.” While Korea does appear to be attempting to make fundamental and structural changes to the existing legal framework, the abilities of unique commissions such as this one appears limited. South Korea’s Korea Communications Standards Commission (“KCSC”) established a sixteen-member digital sex crime monitoring unit in the fall of 2019, following public outcry stemming from both the #MeToo movement and the Burning Sun scandal. For women in particular, tiny, almost imperceptible cameras can be found in, seemingly, the most innocuous of places, such as in screws or in inconspicuous holes on toilet stall doors, in key holes, and even in shower heads. “Molka” is a portmanteau of the Korean word “mollae”, which means secret, and the English word “camera.” At face value, the term can be applied to a variety of situations-some harmless, such as playing a prank on someone and filming it without their knowing-but Korean society today attaches to it a common understanding: it is the use of spy-cameras, the act of secretly filming someone without their consent and then circulating the typically explicit content. This allegation was one cog of the broader Burning Sun scandal, a controversy arising against the backdrop of the growing #MeToo movement in South Korea, starting with an investigation into a local club called ‘Burning Sun’ and resulting in the criminal convictions of multiple celebrities for crimes ranging from tax evasion to the secret filming of sex acts. This was the singer’s second known time being accused of committing the offense. On March 11, 2019, a famous South Korean singer was revealed to have circulated illegal and explicit “molka” footage in a chatroom including other male celebrities.

Korean spy cam scandal