Korean women protest deepfake abuse

Participants in a protest outside Hyehwa Station in Seoul on September 21, 2024, demanding tougher sentences for perpetrators of sexual abuse based on deepfake images. (Kim Chae-woon/Hankyoreh)

“Those who make it, those who sell it, those who watch it. Punish them all!”

On Saturday at 3pm, women in black masks flooded the area in front of Exit 4 of Hyehwa Station, on Line 4 of the Seoul Subway. Six years ago, tens of thousands of women occupied the Daehakno area of ​​Seoul for the 2018 Hyehwa Station protests, denouncing illegal photography. This time, the issue was illegal deepfakes. The core of the problem remains the same: women are angry about sexual crimes that are still widespread in Korean society.

Saturday’s protest was organized by Joint Action against Misogynistic Violence, a coalition of students from six women’s universities in Seoul. The title of the protest was: “Demonstration demands strict punishment for deepfake sexual exploitation: Those who make it, those who sell it, those who watch it: Punish them all!”

According to the organizers’ count, more than 6,000 women were in attendance. The three lanes leading to the Hyehwa-dong Rotary were filled with a procession of women 350 meters long. The protesters condemned lawmakers for failing to pass proper legislation, courts for letting criminals off with a slap on the wrist, and a police force that takes a lax approach to investigating sex crimes.

Angry shouts could be heard everywhere.

“Illegal photography, the Nth Room, and now deepfake sexual exploitation. What has our government done?” the crowd chanted. “How long will men continue to see women as tools for sexual gratification!? Our lives are not your pornography!”

The women who addressed the audience said they feared becoming victims of deepfake sex crimes at any time.

“I have to be careful when I do group projects with male students because there could be a perpetrator among them. Professors, security guards, all the men on campus are people you have to watch out for,” said one student.

“Yet our school’s online forum, Everytime, is full of comments like ‘The feminists are out of control again’ or ‘Stop fueling gender conflict.’ Is conspiring to prevent further victimization and death of women fueling gender conflict?”

Teenage and younger girls also said they live in fear. This is because deepfake crimes have effectively become a form of everyday play or joke in many schools, which fail to educate their students about the seriousness of such crimes or to properly punish perpetrators.

“I was even afraid to come here and speak in front of you, but I realized that nothing will change if I just stay in my anger and sadness,” shared a 17-year-old woman in her sophomore year of high school.

“It is the children in the provinces who suffer the most,” said Jeong Jae-heun, secretary-general of the Gyeongnam Women’s Association.

“Due to the drastic reduction in local school populations, many local schools group children from different grades together, or many regions have only one school for the higher grades. This means that victims can be trapped in the same environment with their perpetrators for up to six years. Yet, schools take no measures to separate victims from their perpetrators,” Jeong said.

“Schools must acknowledge their educational failures and swiftly punish perpetrators,” she continued.

On September 11, police authorities announced that 80% of the perpetrators they arrested for deepfake sex crimes were teenagers or minors.

The people who gathered on the streets claimed that deepfake sex crimes were not new, but merely one aspect of Korea’s history of sex crimes that have arisen due to developments in digital technologies. They blamed the state, which they said had essentially stood by and done nothing.

“By saying ‘boys will be boys,’ our society is complicit in deepfake crimes,” said ReSET, a team of activists that has collected evidence of digital sex crimes and worked with law enforcement to apprehend perpetrators. “Deepfake crimes are just the latest entry in a long history of digital sex crimes. What we should be focusing on is how the exploitation of women by men has evolved alongside developments in digital technologies.”

The group said it “could not help but wonder what state bodies have done during the time that women have been fighting this difficult battle.”

A member of Wolves in the Hell, a collective of unmarried women in South Gyeongsang Province, said that digital sex crimes “are not just deviant acts of individuals, but a problem in which society as a whole is complicit.”

“The government should take the lead and strictly regulate digital platforms, like they do in the US or Europe,” the woman said.

During the two-hour demonstration, the women sitting on the street spoke to their neighbors to introduce themselves and offer encouragement.

“A friend of mine heard about a sexually explicit image of her face being circulated in a group chat with people from her department at school and told me she was considering quitting. I haven’t heard from her since,” said one young woman at the meeting.

“I wish I could show her that there are so many people standing with the victims. All I want to tell her is: please stay alive.”

By Kim Chae-woon, reporter

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