Survey on’online stalking’ for 903 women in their twenties
Digital Sex Crimes Offline Sexual Violence’Trailer’
Personal information prying and sexual image creation and impersonation
Perpetrator specific difficult… The investigation agency is also passive
“Create an independent online stalking punishment law”
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“It threatened me to distribute my photos on the conditional meeting site. That person continued to send messages to my real sister through social media and threatened with it.” “The speed of diffusion was faster than I thought. Offline stalking can be separated from the perpetrator and me as a temporary measure. But I can’t do that online. It doesn’t work in the first place. The fact that damage occurs online means that the identification of what kind of space I am in itself becomes irrelevant.” “Because I went to the same school as the perpetrator, the neighborhood overlapped, so I couldn’t work or work part-time near my house. Sometimes, even the alba I had already obtained was not done in the end.” “I couldn’t ask for help at all. I didn’t even know who the perpetrator was… . Neither me nor my parents nor the people around me had any concept of online stalking. So I didn’t think I had to act legally or report it and take action.” The case of online stalking damage that women in their 20s suffered was desperate, and the expression was desperate. The types of damage ranged from the most common ones that dig up personal information and privacy or transmit strange texts and photos to serious crimes such as impersonating victims. Unlike offline stalking, there were many cases where people had to suffer from fear without even specifying who the perpetrator was. Fear that someone was constantly watching me or that it might hurt me, I had to cut off the online activities that connected myself with my surroundings, couldn’t go out of the house, and had to think about moving and changing jobs. Both online and offline life was threatened. The law on the punishment of stalking crimes that exceeded the threshold of the National Assembly after 22 years of the bill’s initiative (Stalking Penalty Act) was resolved at the State Council on the 13th. President Moon Jae-in referred to the murder of three mothers and daughters in Nowon-gu, Seoul, while deciding on the promulgation of the Stalking Penalty Act. He said, “Please additionally check whether the law promulgated today contains enough stalking measures.” Before President Moon’s order was issued, there were many evaluations in the women’s world that “complementary legislation is needed.” Stalking doesn’t only happen’offline’. Online stalking performed on SNS and messengers is a semi-permanent online space where records remain, so they follow victims and leave scars. What is particularly serious is that online stalking is a’prognostic crime’ that can lead to digital sex crimes or offline sexual violence. The Korean Institute for Women’s Politics (Director Eunjoo Kim) wrote a report last month at the request of the National Assembly Women and Families Committee. This is the result of an in-depth survey of 903 women in their twenties from January to February this year on the perception of online stalking and the actual condition of damage. The Stalking Penalty Act, which is enforced in September, regulates only the transmission of unwanted texts and images as online stalking, but the types of offenses identified in this large-scale survey were much more diverse and overlapping. Researchers submitted an opinion to the National Assembly that a separate online stalking punishment method is needed to break the chain of crimes that go online and offline.
■ Eight out of 10 women in their 20s “have been stalking online”
“Photos of my face were circulated in a chat room, and sexual harassment was rampant there, and at that time, I was a junior high student, so I didn’t know how to respond. I was told to stop, but I tried to move on as quietly as possible because if I said something more there, I would upload my picture somewhere.”
As a result of the survey on online stalking damage, 715 out of 903 female respondents in their 20s (79.2%) said they had experienced online stalking. Most of the damage types were outside the boundaries of the stalking punishment law. More than half of the respondents reported experiencing online stalking such as △ finding and storing personal information (56.8%), △ prying out private life (56.4%) △ sending unwanted texts and images (54%). Unidentified people steal personal information through SNS accounts or messenger profiles, and send unwanted texts and images on a daily basis. In particular, the researchers focused on cases of damages: △using personal information to impersonate a party (18.1%), △using personal information for other crimes (14.6%) △distributing personal information to encourage third-party crimes (7.5%). “Online stalking acts as a link between other crimes and adds double or triple pain to the victim, so it is a very serious issue regardless of the relatively low frequency of occurrence.”
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In fact, the fact that online stalking does not end as a one-time assault, but acts as a’bridge’ and’bridge’ that leads to other serious crimes, was confirmed in a fact-finding investigation. 13.9% of female respondents in their 20s said that online stalking led to other online and offline abuses. Victims who responded to an in-depth interview (FGI) reported that they had been disseminated of their face photos by an online stalking perpetrator.
“Someone who is supposed to be a student at the same school has posted my home address, student number, real name, and contact information on the school’s online community. There have been times when male students from other schools who don’t know about it have been stalking me and chasing me, scribbles around my house or visiting my house five times. It didn’t end with that, but my current situation was added afterwards, and anonymous users sexually harassed me or evaluated my appearance.”
In-depth interview respondents said that their photos were sometimes posted online along with personal information such as name, age, and place of residence, and that such photos and personal information were reprocessed as sexual images. Once the personal information collected by online stalking was distributed in the digital space, the damage range was expanded indiscriminately regardless of online or offline. Researchers analyzed that “online stalking is very threatening that the damage is semi-permanent with just one offense, like digital sex crime.”
■ Anonymous perpetrator specific difficult… Only 8.8% of victims reported to investigation agencies
Unlike offline stalking, online stalking is difficult to identify perpetrators. When asked who the main perpetrators of victims in their twenties were, 31.5% of respondents said they didn’t know at all, and 19% said they didn’t know the perpetrator. It is that difficult to break the loop of harm that is expanding to the 2nd and 3rd order.
“I couldn’t ask for help at all. I didn’t know who was the perpetrator in the first place, and I thought I couldn’t investigate the unspecified majority. Even if I found the perpetrator, all of them would be students, so it seemed like I would not take any action… . I’d rather be as quiet as possible because if I didn’t show any reactions, the other side would lose interest in me.”
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It is difficult to identify the perpetrators of online stalking, so it is difficult to “separate” the victim from the perpetrator like offline stalking. “The victim’s anxiety about online stalking is maximized in the peculiarity of the online environment where the victim and the perpetrator cannot be separated temporarily or permanently. “Technical sanctions that make it impossible to do so.” Unlike offline stalking, which has recently begun to be recognized as a serious crime, online stalking without physical violence is also lacking in recognition that it can be a crime. There were quite a few respondents who had never heard of the term online stalking (23.6%) or did not know what it meant (28.3%). As a result, women themselves tend to minimize the damage of online stalking. It was also considered as a’courtship activity’ or an’expression of interest’ for acquaintances or ex-lovers to pry personal information through SNS or messenger.
“I didn’t know what online stalking was, and I never really learned it. It was the atmosphere where I didn’t tell me about it, and my friends said to me,’I think he did it because he liked you so much.’ That’s why I thought,’Ah, this is because he likes me so much’… .”
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Investigation agencies and counseling agencies also lacked awareness and understanding of online stalking, so there were many cases where victims of victims who took courage to report them took a step back. 33.8% of online stalking occurred through’instant messengers’ such as KakaoTalk, Instagram, and Twitter DM. In this case, there were cases where the response of the investigative agency was modest due to the fact that the server was overseas.
“At that time, I didn’t know that there was an agency to respond to violence against women. Instead, I went to the school’s week class (Student Counseling Support Center), and I heard an answer saying,’You can’t report this and you have no choice but to avoid it.’ I took responsibility in the way that’you can study well and go to college well’, but I couldn’t hear the answer to the damage response. So I didn’t think I was a stalking victim at the time.” “I reported it to both the police women and adolescents and cyber criminals, and I submitted 100 pieces of evidence, but the investigation was not done properly. I heard that Twitter couldn’t find the perpetrator because it was an overseas server, and I only knew the other person’s face, and I wasn’t sure if the name was real.”
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In this situation, victims of women chose to resolve personally rather than go through legal procedures such as reporting to an investigative agency. △The online account was closed (19%), △the service was discontinued (13.4%), △the account was deleted and a new account was created (11.4%). Only 8.8% of respondents said they took active measures, such as reporting to the platform reporting center where online stalking occurred or to the police cyberinvestigation team.
■ “The law needs to be amended to punish online stalking”
The Stalking Penalty Act to be implemented in SeptemberHas opened the way to punish online stalking by defining’the act of reaching texts or words using mail, telephone, or information and communication networks’ as one of the stalking acts. However, as confirmed in this large-scale survey, most of the major online stalking behaviors escape all laws created in 22 years. There are no regulations punishing the collection, processing, or dissemination of personal information without the permission of the person concerned, or using it for other crimes. There are only 10 types of online stalking defined and categorized in the report submitted to the National Assembly, and there is still no way to punish these acts by grouping them as’stalking’ rather than violation of the Personal Information Protection Act. Another barrier to online stalking punishment is that the Stalking Penalty Act requires continuity and repetition of behavior as a component of stalking crime. Researchers said, “Because online stalking can cause enormous damage even once, it is quite problematic to interpret more than two times as repeatability (like the stalking punishment method). In the case of online stalking, the composition requirements for stalking crime should be approached differently.” In fact, many respondents said that online stalking was less than one month (40.9%) and one time (35%). Online stalking is different from offline stalking, which presupposes direct contact and violence between the victim and the perpetrator. Due to the nature of online, victim pain spreads rapidly. Digitized pain is semi-permanently reproduced and repeated. For this reason, the report suggested that researchers should independently prepare laws that can practically punish online stalking, which is distinct from offline stalking. In the US, 49 states excluding Nebraska are penalizing cyber harassment and cyber stalking as separate laws. There is no reason for the National Assembly to hesitate to enact supplementary legislation or a separate online stalking punishment law after taking the first step of the Stalking Penalty Act. By Lim Jae-woo, staff reporter [email protected]