South Korea’s high- tech peeping Toms

Seoul: Walking into an empty women’s bathroom stall, Park Kwang- Mi waves a hand- held detector around the toilet seat, paper roll holder, doorknob and even the ventilation grill on the ceiling.

“It’s my job to make sure there’s no camera to film women while they relieve themselves,” the 49- yearold said after inspecting dozens of public toilet stalls at a museum in Seoul.

A member of Seoul city’s all- female “hidden camera- hunting” squad, Park is at the forefront of a battle against “molka”, or “secret camera” porn.

South Korea takes pride in its tech prowess, from ultra- fast broadband to cutting- edge smartphones. But it’s a culture that has also given rise to an army of tech- savvy peeping Toms in a still male- dominated country with a poor record on women’s rights.

Many use special smartphone apps to film up women’s skirts as they ride subway escalators or sit at desks, and spy cameras to gather footage from changing rooms and toilet stalls.

The images are then often shared to numerous molka speciality sites on the Internet.

Molka

crimes are daily news, and perpetrators cover a broad social range. A pastor at a Seoul mega- church with 100,000 members was caught filming up a woman’s skirt on an escalator.

A 31- year- old obstetrician was jailed for secretly filming female patients and nurses in a changing room and sharing some of the images on the Internet.

While some offenders use smartphones, others employ spy- style gadgets, including ballpoint pens, glasses or wrist watches

equipped with micro lenses, said Hyun Heung- Ho, a detective attached to Seoul police’s metro squad.

Convicted

offenders face a fine of up to 10 million won ($ 9,100) or a maximum jail term of five years.

To help with their crackdown, police have offered cash rewards to those reporting molka crimes and the Seoul city council has hired dozens of women like Park to scour bathrooms and other spaces for hidden cameras.

According

to Lee NaYoung, a sociology professor at Hanyang University in Seoul, the only real solution is a societal one.

Lee said “upskirt videos” had been avidly consumed in South Korea and Japan for decades.

“Both are deeply conservative nations where open discussion of sex is quite taboo, people feel sexually oppressed and women are relentlessly objectified and discriminated against,” she said.

Average pay for South Korean women is 63.3 per cent that of men and women account for 11 per cent of managerial positions and 2.1 per cent of corporate boards — far lower than the OECD average of 31 per cent and 19 per cent.

In this environment, some men view women as nothing more than sexual objects, Lee said, describing the molka trend as a “wrong marriage between fast- evolving technology and slow- evolving patriarchal culture.”

South Korea takes pride in its tech prowess, from ultra- fast broadband to cutting- edge smartphones. But it's a culture that has also given rise to an army of techsavvy peeping Toms