On May 12th, more than two million people signed an online petition saying that “The government has to disclose the identity of a man who ran the group chat named Nth Room on the Telegram messaging app.” Nth Room is the chat room where the teen sexual exploitation videos are distributed. The hosts of Nth Room shot juvenile pornography and shared videos on the Nth Room. One of the hosts named “baksa” which means doctor had enticed women by pretending to offer well-paid part-time employment and ended up being arrested on March 16th. Hosts forced victims to perform the desired acts saying they will disclose their pornographic materials to victims’ friends and family. The pornography even included actions such as rape and sexual torture. These crimes are not the only cases of the Nth Room. In 2018, “Welcome to Video”, the world's largest video site for sexual exploitation of children was also revealed. There are three main causes that teen sexual exploitation occurs repeatedly.

     The first reason why these crimes happen repeatedly is because the sex offenders use the “Dark Web.” According to the online security industry, there are three kinds of a website such as surface web, deep web, and dark web. Surface web is the portion of the World Wide Web that is readily available to the general public and searchable with standard web search engines. Deep web, such as telegram chat room and open chat rooms of KakaoTalk, is not operated by standard web search engines, so the information may require a password or other security access. Crimes on surface and deep web are generally easy to be caught. However, dark web uses invisible search engines, requires the use of an anonymizing browser, and sometimes uses cryptocurrency that is hard to investigate. For this reason, the underage sexual exploitations are hard to be illuminated. Kim Huy Kang (Prof. of Information Security, Korea University Graduate School of Information Security) said, “If people share videos using the telegram and leave no trace on the surface web, it is difficult to search or monitor them. It is because only invited people can access to the dark website.”

     The second reason is that the Telegram on which the videos are shared does not cooperate with investigative agencies. Telegram has attracted many users with its slogan “Freedom not to be censored.” Therefore, it is unlikely that Telegram will help the police due to their motto. In fact, from 2014 to 2017, Telegram was used as a communication channel for IS terrorists, but the founder of telegram adhered to their motto that “Personal privacy rights are more important than threats” and did not provide terrorists’ information to the police. Moreover, it is difficult to investigate because it is not clear where the headquarters of telegram are located. According to the Seoul newspaper, the sexual exploiters who are aware of this situation shared videos of sexual exploitation via telegram immediately after one of hosts was arrested. Without its cooperation, sexual exploitation videos seem to hardly disappear. Lim Jong In (Prof. of Cyber defense, Korea University Graduate School of Information Security) said, “It is impossible to get
cooperation from the Telegram because the founder of it is pursuing business model not to disclose its users’ identity. Although a list of some Nth Room users is secured, that of visitors who temporarily visited the chat room may not be easy to be arrested without cooperation.”

     Lastly, punishment is weak even if sex offenders are caught. Under the current law, there is no provision for punishment for Nth Room participants who only watched videos. This is because the Juvenile Protection Act only regulates pornography “possession.” In addition, even if sex offenders who distribute and download videos are caught, they are imprisoned only up to one year and fined up to 20 million won. On the other hand, the United States even punishes people who once attempt to obtain child pornography. According to the “Child Porn Act,” people can be imprisoned up to 10 years due to accessing it for viewing or possession of child sexual video. In addition, in the United Kingdom, people who have child sex videos can be imprisoned for up to five years. In fact, the Wall Street Journal once reported that South Korea's punishment for child pornography crimes is too generous. Lim said, “Sexual exploitation of children is currently the most condemned crimes internationally. South Korea is facing a problem because the penalty is too weak. The crime of child sexual exploitation will be reduced when the penalty is strengthened and social awareness is raised.” '

By Ha Yoon-Seok, Editor-in-Chief
etude1996@pusan.ac.kr