Last winter, when Chung Soo-young saw a man rushing out of a women’s restroom at a chain coffee shop in downtown Seoul, the…
Last winter, when Chung Soo-young saw a man rushing out of a women’s restroom at a chain coffee shop in downtown Seoul, the first thing she did was to scan all stalls in search of a hidden camera. Like many other South Korean women, Chung, 26, constantly worries that she could be secretly filmed in private moments. Her fear spiked, she says, when she saw the intruder and “realized I can actually be a victim.”
In South Korea, micro-cameras installed in public bathrooms for surreptitious filming are an everyday concern. Police data show that the number of “illegal filming” crimes sharply increased from 1,353 in 2011 to 6,470 in 2017.
The fear of digital Peeping Toms has led women to stuff tiny rolls of toilet paper into holes they find in public bathroom stalls, or cover the holes with tape. Six months after her bathroom incident, Chung decided to act and put together her own “emergency kit” to thwart molka, or hidden cameras.
She started a crowdfunding project for the kit, and the response was greater than she had expected. More than 600 people bought the kit, which costs about $12 (14,000 Korean won) and includes a tube of silicone sealant to fill up holes, an ice pick to break tiny camera lenses and stickers to patch up holes.
Thinking of her kits as a “stopgap,” Chung also started building an archive of illicitly recorded videos and pictures she found online to demonstrate how serious the problem is. In September, during a search, she stumbled on a video of herself from that December day.
Once filmed, molka videos are quickly shared online. With the right search words in Korean, it is not difficult to find pictures and videos of women in bathrooms and changing rooms on file sharing platforms and social networks like Tumblr and Twitter. Thumbnails of such videos, tagged with an estimated age of filmed women or the filming location, are posted with a messenger ID. Anyone can contact the seller, who is often the one who shot the film, and get gigabytes of voyeuristic videos for pennies.
With South Korea’s fast Internet speeds and high rate of smartphone ownership, “This kind of distorted sexual culture is becoming the norm,” warns professor Lee Sue-jung, a criminal psychologist at Kyonggi University, outside Seoul.
But easy access to advanced technology is just part of the picture. The other part is what Yoon-Kim Ji-young of Konkuk University’s Institute of Body and Culture calls “the most backward culture of misogyny” in South Korea.
