Pornography exists the world over, but do men go to greater lengths in Korea than elsewhere to take secret photographs of women? The BBC’s Seoul correspondent, Stephen Evans, investigates.\
The other day I just typed into the search box the word for a very obscure term in music. I’m learning the guitar and I wanted to know what acciaccatura* meant.
What it doesn’t mean is what popped up, namely a very hard-core Korean pornography site – which is odd in a country where pornography is illegal.
It is a constant cat-and-mouse game. In April, the police in Seoul succeeded in shutting down a server in Holland that offered porn to Korean users. It had switched there from the United States, having been shut down there too.
Indeed, there’s an industry in pornography provided for the web by hidden cameras in ladies’ toilets, incredible though that may seem and as unattractive as that may sound.
The authorities do try to combat it. There’s an official squad in Seoul which searches toilets for hidden cameras. In the southern city of Busan over the summer, police were told to look out for men with cameras acting suspiciously. Local media reported that officers used metal detectors in women’s changing rooms to find hidden cameras.
Manufacturers co-operate by installing an audible shutter-click on phone cameras to deter the taking of pictures surreptitiously up skirts.
So serious is this problem that the government printed posters of a woman on an escalator with a man behind her taking a low photo. The caption said: “Please cover your skirt.”
This generated a row. Women said the poster placed the blame on them. It implied that if only they didn’t wear short skirts, this wouldn’t happen.
There was, incidentally, a mini-storm when men told newspapers about the humiliation of having women in front of them on the escalator cover their legs. They complained that they were being treated like perverts when they were in fact innocent.
I went to a tech show here the other day, full of gizmos and geeks. And, I think, the odd perv (very odd, he seemed to me). I watched a sleazy looking man, who frankly needed a good wash, going round with his camera taking pictures of the leggy women in tight skirts and blouses whom companies here feel they need just in order to sell a gadget.
When I first flew on Korean Air, I was amazed to hear a pre-flight announcement warning that sexual harassment of cabin attendants was contrary to aviation law. It was an attempt to protect the glamorous female staff from the octopus hands of businessmen.
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