Sexual Activity Posted by Ex-boyfriend Still Spreading After 3 Years! Where Are the Police and Can Giant Platform Be Held Responsible for the Victims Trauma?
[Joon] Your sexual photos and videos may have been posted and spread all over the Internet without your knowledge. Once posted, they are reprinted in various media and never completely disappear. The pain and fear of not knowing who is watching lasts almost forever.
(Continued from Part 1)
A male police officer says, “I’m going to make this very clear.”
A few days after noticing the hacking, Ms. A called the police for advice. She called the police to ask how she should deal with the damage. A male police officer at one police station interviewed Ms. A for about 30 minutes about her situation.
The police officer on the phone groaned, “Hmmm,” or was at a loss for words and silent for several seconds. When I told him the name of the application, he said he did not know it. However, when I told him that Ms. A’s image had been spread by hundreds of people, he said firmly, “I’m going to be very clear.”
When I told him that her image was being spread by hundreds of people, he said firmly, “I’m going to make this clear, but once it’s spread on the Internet like that, it can’t be completely eliminated. We have no choice but to ask people to delete the images as many times as possible when they find them.”
Ms. A. told us that she had received harassing messages on social networking sites, and asked what the police could do.
After informing them that she had received harassing messages on social networking sites, Ms. A asked, “Isn’t it a crime to access a photo that was uploaded without consent, contact the person in the photo, and sexually harass them?”
The other person bristled.
“That depends,” he said. We won’t know until we see how the contact was made, and in the first place, well, there are various cases of defamation nowadays,” he said.
The police make a case because they want to punish the other party. So, if you want to claim compensation for defamation, you can go to civil court. That is up to Ms. A, though. But if you want to make a civil claim, you should talk to a lawyer or something.
However, Ms. A does not want to punish the other party. She wants to deal with the damage, which is still spreading. However, the police officer just kept repeating, “I want you to ask the operator of the app to delete it.”
“I can’t live by myself if I think about it.”
Ms. A graduated from high school last spring and went on to university to study design and other subjects. She had just moved to a new place for her higher education and started a new life.
She told me after the attack, “I have to try not to think about what happened to me. If I think about it, I can’t live peacefully.”
There is not a single reason why she should have to go through this. I felt really unforgivable that her life was being destroyed in this way.
From there I started gathering information about this app on the Internet and social networking sites. After a while, I learned about the case of Ms. B, whose video was posted on the same app as Ms. A’s. I got in touch with her relatives and asked them to tell me their story.
Ms. B, who was in her 20s at the time of the victimization, was in a relationship with a man she met on a matching app several years ago when he filmed her during sexual intercourse.
Without Ms. B’s permission, the man posted the videos on an Internet bulletin board. The bulletin board is free and open to all. The man explained that he was just acting out of curiosity. He then explained that he became afraid of what he had posted and deleted the post after about an hour.
A short time later, an anonymous message arrived on Mr. B’s SNS saying that the video had been leaked; similar to Ms. A’s case, the victim himself could not realize that the video had been leaked until he was notified by someone.
When Ms. B became aware of the damage, she took care of it herself by searching for the postings and sending a request to the operator to delete them.
Followed her on her way home and wrote letters to her home…
When the spread of the video was discovered, Ms. B’s life changed drastically.
Afraid to go outside, she took time off work and shut herself in her home. When he walked around town, he was driven by the fear that one of these people might have seen her video.
Over the next few months, she gradually began to go outside.
But on her way home from work, he felt someone was following him, more than once or twice. Around this time, the relatives received frequent phone calls from Ms. B, who said she might be being stalked. Whenever she went out, the relatives tried to accompany her as much as possible.
One day, a letter arrived suddenly in her mailbox. The content of the letter was about the leaking of the video. There was no postmark on the letter. Someone must have posted it directly to her mailbox.
I immediately moved out of my home at the time. However, the fear that someone might know about her wherever she was did not disappear.
Around that time, Ms. B attempted suicide. She was rushed to the hospital and survived.
Three years have passed.
I have consulted with the police, but have yet to file a damage report. I am afraid that by filing a damage report, the damage will become public and escalate. The psychological hurdle of having to tell the police officer the details of the situation is also a high psychological hurdle.
After discussions with the man who first posted the video, a settlement was reached. However, more than three years have passed since the first video was posted, and Ms. B’s videos are still being exposed on the Internet several times a month.
When she walks outside, she wears a mask and glasses to hide her face. She has also changed his hairstyle significantly from the time the video was taken. Her appearance has changed, but if you look closely, you will recognize her. The fear of people’s eyes does not disappear.
It is a crime to provide or publish sexual images without the person’s consent.
In addition to violating the Act on the Prevention of Damage Caused by the Provision of Private Sexual Images and Records (commonly known as the Revenge Pornography Prevention Act), which came into effect in 2014, depending on the nature of the offending act, it may be considered a violation of the Child Pornography Act, a crime of distribution of obscene material, a crime of coercion, a violation of the Stalker Control Act, or other multiple crimes at the same time. The Ministry of Justice is currently considering adding a new crime of “filming” to the Penal Code, which regulates sex crimes, such as voyeuristic photography.
According to the Ministry of Justice’s “White Paper on Crime 2021,” there are approximately 200 to 250 arrests for such crimes each year.
But is this really enough to keep up with the number of arrests? I was immensely surprised when I looked up the apps that the two victims had been using.
I found more than 300 women whose photos and videos had been posted on the app in just 10 minutes of searching on the Internet.
Interview and text by： Mariko Tsuji
While at Waseda University, Mariko Tsuji became a member of the Waseda Chronicle (now Tansa); from June 2019 to June 2022, she also worked as a reporter for Toyo Keizai, writing on topics such as child abuse, psychiatry, and the reproductive business; at Tansa, she created a pharmaceutical money database and reported on the wasteful spending of the Corona temporary grant for local development He has also reported on the creation of a pharmaceutical money database and the verification of the wasteful spending of Corona's temporary local development subsidy. He is co-author of "Reporto: Gulag Archipelago.
