In 2021, out of the blue, Ruma — a South Korean doctoral student studying overseas — started to receive sexually explicit images of herself. They were sent to her along with videos of men masturbating to her likeness. The explicit content was not really of her: Pictures of her face had been digitally combined with pornography before being shared, along with her name and contact details, on a group on the Telegram messaging service. Ruma is a pseudonym she has chosen in her public victim statement, which she published in the South Korean daily newspaper Hankyoreh. A trial is underway, three years after her images were first shared.
“I realized that all of these abhorrent offenses were done by people I knew from my university class,” the statement reads. The two perpetrators — who both studied at Seoul National University — targeted multiple other students before being caught.
Ruma went on to describe that period of her life as hellish. Floods of misogynistic comments were shared about her on the Telegram group, she was insulted in the most offensive terms possible and her world was shattered by the knowledge that she had sat in the same lecture halls as the men who knowingly did this to her. She became suicidal and was still suffering from PTSD when she finally got her day in court.
In the three years since Ruma’s images were shared, access to artificial intelligence technology has mushroomed, allowing anyone with a computer to generate so-called deepfakes — fabricated images, videos and audio that appear highly realistic — in mere seconds. In South Korea, a country with among the highest household internet availability in the world, deepfake sexual abuse has skyrocketed.
In August, a South Korean journalist discovered the existence of dozens of closed Telegram group chats with the sole purpose of creating and sharing deepfake images of women and girls. Dubbed “acquaintance humiliation rooms,” they encouraged users to share photos of the women in their lives. Pornographic deepfakes would then be sent back. Some of the chat rooms were dedicated to named universities; others targeted specific women or girls. Some targeted schools.
Intense public outrage has pushed the South Korean government to enact stricter legislation around deepfake abuse. The country was one of the world’s first to introduce laws specifically tackling deepfake crimes.
Despite the government’s quick response, some in South Korea believe that the root causes of these gendered crimes are not being adequately addressed. Women’s rights groups lament that the nation’s rage has focused mainly on perpetrators who target school-age girls, largely overlooking the ubiquity of digital sex crimes against adult women in the country, not to mention South Korea’s poor record on gender equity. South Korea has consistently had the highest gender wage gap among nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development since 1996. As of this year, only one-fifth of South Korea’s National Assembly members were women, lagging behind the global average.
But even agreeing on the role that gender plays in these crimes is not straightforward. The topic of gender inequality in South Korea has become more contentious in recent years and the country’s strong feminist movement has seen increasing pushback from young men.
In fact, President Yoon Suk Yeol has built his political platform on this backlash. During his election campaign, he declared that structural gender inequality no longer existed in South Korea. He then followed through on his campaign promises to defund women’s organizations, weakening institutional support and abolishing the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.
This growing schism and distrust between men and women in the country has been dubbed a gender war by some. As in most wars, it is the young on the front line.
Soojin Kim is an elementary school teacher and member of Outbox, a collective that creates educational material for children about gender equality. Kim explains that many girls in her local area, at high schools and even middle and elementary schools, have been targeted by deepfake sexual abuse. She believes that the number of cases is much higher than reported.
Official numbers already show a sharp rise in such cases. Over the span of just a few weeks, from late August to early September, reports of deepfake abuse cases in schools more than doubled, according to the Department of Education. A little over one-third of victims who sought help from the country’s national support center for digital sexual abuse in 2024 were girls in their teenage years or younger. And South Korea’s National Police Agency revealed that 83% of perpetrators arrested for deepfake sexual crimes in 2024 were teenage boys.
“Young girls in schools actually cannot trust their peers, their friends or their classmates,” explains Oh Kyungjin from Korean Women’s Associations United, an umbrella organization for the women’s movement.
Kim echoes this sentiment, explaining that girls have now taken to deleting all of their photos from social media out of fear, and many no longer trust digital spaces that promise privacy. “During one of our training sessions on deepfake sextortion, a 12-year-old sixth grader asked me, ‘Can I be deepfaked if I post a picture on my private account?’” she recalls. Technically, such accounts can still be hacked, so girls are learning from a young age that no matter how “private” they believe a digital space to be, the internet in Korea guarantees them neither privacy nor safety.
Women’s rights activists have been vocally critical of the Department of Education’s failure to see the deepfake crisis as a specifically gendered issue. They believe that without education on gender inequality, measures to tackle the problem are simply a game of cat and mouse.
When contacted for comment by New Lines, the Department of Education declined to respond to questions about the gendered nature of deepfake abuse and what the department is doing to tackle the issue, given that school-age boys are commonly the perpetrators.
Without dedicated education on the seriousness of these offenses and how they impact girls, boys take their influences from a gamified online world that can be objectifying and rewards extreme behavior.
“It seems that deepfake crime is being understood among teens, not as a grave crime of sexual violence, but as a sort of game, like a plaything,” says EJ Lee, an activist for Korea Women’s Hot-Line, an organization that supports survivors.
Aha! is a Seoul-based organization that works to rehabilitate youth offenders after digital crimes. A spokesperson for Aha! explains that the boys they work with are navigating a world both on- and offline in which extreme content is normalized: “They are exposed to pornography, games, gambling, drugs and so many other social problems. This is tightly tied to the gender hierarchy and the structure of the sexual exploitation industry.”
When boys lack empathy for the distress of girls subjected to their abuse, Aha!’s programs help them develop gender sensitivity, self-reflection and an awareness of the harm they’re causing. By its own accounts, Aha!’s education programs are successful in curbing recidivism rates.
Despite — or perhaps because of — the endemic online abuse in South Korea, the country has been at the forefront of the global conversations about digital sexual abuse. In the late 2010s, a feminist movement swept the country. Online abuse and misogynistic digital platforms were a central focus.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets screaming, “My life is not your porn!” in response to a surge in illicit spy camera footage of women being shared on porn sites. The relentless campaigning helped push through legislation on digital harm and secured state-funded support services for victims. These specialist services stand in contrast to the nonprofits of the United States and United Kingdom, which rely on charitable donations, grants and volunteers to take down harmful images, rather than state funding and expert staff. In 2020, targeted laws were passed in South Korea criminalizing the creation of deepfake sexual content with the intent to harm. Although these laws have certain loopholes, they are trailblazing in the region and beyond.
Just weeks after these changes were made, a man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for distributing deepfake porn images of his fellow university students — the most severe penalty yet to have been handed down for these crimes. Japan’s legislation, for example, does not lead to the prosecution of perpetrators of digitally synthesized material. In the U.S., there is no federal law tackling deepfake abuse and, out of only three states to have passed legislation on deepfake harm, one focuses on election misinformation rather than sexual abuse.
However, South Korea’s example also reveals the difficulties of enforcing these laws. Societal attitudes play an important role. South Korea’s conservative social context and an entrenched patriarchal attitude that “boys will be boys” are cited as the main reasons why perpetrators are too often handed slap-on-the-wrist sentences while victims face dismissive attitudes from the police.
When contacted for comment by New Lines, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said it is “responding strictly” to this new outbreak of crimes. Their spokesperson noted they have created a special task force to “intensively investigate deepfake sex crimes.” They did not respond to questions about the public’s lack of trust in the agency.
Regardless, this ramped-up approach is an improvement from the days before feminist protests. The shift in attitudes and resulting changes in legislation could be seen as a direct result of the bright spotlight feminist activists in South Korea have shone on the problem. Yet as this spotlight has intensified, so too has dissent.
Not everyone in South Korea agrees that women’s rights need to be championed. In fact, a poll conducted by the reputable newspaper Hankook Ilbo in 2021 found that nearly 80% of men in their 20s believe that they are victims of serious gender discrimination. Hawon Jung is a South Korean journalist and author of “Flowers of Fire,” a book about South Korea’s feminist movements and their struggle for equality. She views the proliferation of misogyny online as, at least in part, a backlash — a form of “getting back” at women.
“The point is more like humiliating women, putting women in their place, treating them not as human beings who deserve privacy and respect. It’s about getting ‘lad points’ from peers on the internet,” Jung said, referring to a way of interacting that reinforces masculinity. “It’s a very twisted sense of empowerment and male solidarity, where sharing these videos becomes a group sport, a way of humiliating women and feeling a sense of power.”
This toxic masculinity and antifeminist sentiment has spread through male-dominated online spaces. Gaming communities, in particular, act as one of the canaries in the coal mine, the ground zero of antifeminist backlash. Women working in the gaming industry have, at times, become targets of this outrage, as fans have scrutinized their public statements and condemned any perceived feminist views. Hankyoreh reports that some employers have chosen to respond with disciplinary action and even dismissal against employees who are vocal about the toxic gaming culture.
New Lines spoke to three women who have worked in the gaming industry in South Korea, all of whom chose to speak anonymously out of fear of backlash. Ju-eun Lee, speaking under a pseudonym, has worked on a number of games targeted at men and says she’s witnessed the misogyny in the online gaming community firsthand.
“I’ve entered an online forum before, to get information about the game I was playing, and left disgusted at the words being used to describe female characters,” she said.
Ju-eun Lee has also stopped playing certain games that encourage voice chats among players. Once players identify a woman’s voice, sexist comments are hurled her way: “Women can’t play well” or “I’ll forgive you if you’re pretty.”
Ju-eun Lee believes it’s not a leap to see the superior attitudes of men in these forums as resulting from the industry unscrupulously favoring male customers. This focus on men can result in highly sexualized female characters in games — exaggerated breasts and buttocks flailing about in unrealistic ways. Sometimes female characters wear revealing school uniforms, bunny girl outfits or maid costumes, even when games are rated 15+.
Ju-eun Lee worries that the sexism wielded at female game characters exports offline too. She says she has even witnessed women who cosplay as characters from games receive direct abuse.
A young woman who started innocently cosplaying as a teen told New Lines that she experienced this abuse firsthand. She was just 13 years old. Apart from being persistently harassed by a man who wanted her to sell him her used underwear, she was also followed by a “humiliation profile” on X (formerly Twitter). Although this happened prior to the widespread use of AI, the anonymous profile was dedicated to creating fake, explicit images of girls, depicting them with their eyes rolled back, faces covered in semen.
“I was shocked and terrified. When I was followed by the humiliation profile, I panicked. I couldn’t sleep. My hands were shaking when I had to chat with the perpetrator,” she remembered.
She deleted her online profiles and was too afraid to check whether her images had been posted. The mere possibility of this consumed her. “I developed a panic disorder. I couldn’t adapt to school life and my academic performance declined.”
Fearing her cosplaying hobby would be blamed, the girl never told her parents or teachers.
The dangers girls face in digital spaces are not confined to South Korea. Across East Asia and the world, the phenomenon of digital innovations being used for gendered abuse continues to grow. South Korea’s neighbors face their own unique challenges.
In Japan, a tendency to sexualize youthful female characters lurks not far beneath the surface of the otherwise rich and varied worlds of online gaming, manga and anime. A visit to the malls of Tokyo’s Akihabara district takes you through rows upon rows of cutesy-looking illustrations and figurines. Most of these show girls in suggestive poses, their revealing outfits a sharp contrast to the infantile appearance of the characters. There are even vending machines that sell used schoolgirls’ panties for a chunk of change.
It was only last year that the age of consent in Japan was raised from 13 to 16. The possession of child pornography was legal until 2014. Before then, only the creation and distribution of sexual images of children under the age of 18 was a crime. Pressure from the United Nations and international rights groups finally pushed for updated laws to meet global standards of child protection. But the intense backlash from Japan’s arts world ensured that fictional depictions of child sexual abuse in games, manga and anime — ubiquitous even today — remained protected under the law.
Kazuna Kanajiri, Chief Director of the Organization for Pornography and Sexual Exploitation Survivors (PAPS), a Japanese organization dedicated to supporting victims of digital sexual crimes, says that “it is difficult for society as a whole to recognize the human rights violations of deepfake pornography,” as the law allows fictional material to include images of children in sexual fantasies. The organization has seen the number of women it supports grow year on year, but none have yet reported being victims of deepfake abuse.
On X, it is easy to find profiles offering deepfake services in Japanese. One post advertises: “1) A wide variety of pose settings. 2) Costume changes. 3) Adjustment of body shape, chest and buttocks size.”
Nonetheless, the country has made some effort to place responsibility on internet platforms to take down harmful content. This is a strategy that lawmakers and politicians in neighboring Taiwan are hoping to implement in their upcoming digital harms legislation.
Taiwan has been slower than neighboring countries on this front, with the legislation currently underway focused on the spread of misinformation — a particular concern due to fears of political interference from China. But Wang Wan-yu, the chairperson of the New Power Party in Taiwan, has made digital harm against children central to her political vision and praises Seoul’s comprehensive legislation.
She wants to see similar progress on victims’ services and has publicly said that “a separate law should be enacted specifically for nonconsensual intimate images.”
Unlike in Japan, early drafts of the Taiwanese legislation do include provisions on harmful deepfake materials.
Speaking to New Lines, Wang emphasized the importance of political will when it comes to protecting women and girls. This rings true across the region. In Taiwan, as in South Korea, the push has come from civil society following high-profile cases, in the midst of political wavering.
Following the recent revelations about schoolchildren being among those targeted through Telegram group chats, the South Korean government moved swiftly to update deepfake laws. Loopholes around intent to harm have been closed and punishments ramped up. But tension remains. Activists believe that outside of girls being harmed, women’s issues are being sidelined.
“The police and government response to this type of crime is to deal with it as an isolated phenomenon,” says EJ Lee, adding that failing to see these crimes as some of the “many ways that gender-based violence is perpetrated in our society can only result in temporary solutions.”
Jung also emphasizes that “technology has changed but the underlying sentiment behind these kinds of crimes has changed little.” She believes that educating the next generation is key.
With South Korea’s president gaining vocal support from young men for his denial of structural gender inequality in the country, calls for more gender-sensitive education may fall on deaf ears.
As with much in South Korea, the contrasts are stark. On the one hand, the country has launched itself at fiber-optic cable speed into the digital era; on the other, traditional social hierarchies and attitudes have been slow to change.
On one side of the divide are the highly organized feminist movements, which have been pivotal to South Korea’s development of some of the most robust legislation in the world regarding digital sexual abuse. On the other side stands the country’s current leadership, who are working to dismantle the very structures that are fighting for these laws to be effective.
Written by Severia Bel with translations and additional reporting by Hyerim Jang
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