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.
