Toughen the punishment on deepfake sex crimes

To make matters worse, an increasing number of male students — and their female counterparts — do this against one another.

Yang Sung-heeThe author is a columnist of the JoongAng Ilbo. A highly volatile case of creating and sharing sexually explicit deepfake images erupted at Inha University last week following a similar case at Seoul National University (SNU) three months ago. The exploitative act is undoubtedly a serious crime. In the latest case at Inha University, more than 1,200 students joined a suspicious chat room on Telegram and over 20 students were victimized. Just like the earlier case at SNU, police claimed that it is difficult to identify the suspects because the server is located overseas. As a result, a victim had to enter the chat room undercover to collect clear evidence of sexual offenses for one year. Two suspects were arrested by the police, but one of them, an Inha University student, was released after claiming that he only saw the images. The current law does not regard the act of passive watching as a crime as long as offenders didn’t create such images for the purpose of diffusion. The police are also investigating two other suspects.

Such shocking cases are not confined to the two universities. A novel chat room is being shared by people who know one another. They create and share sexually explicit fake images of their mutual acquaintances. A chat room with 1,300 members had 70 smaller chat rooms representing each university. In the Inha University case, a suspect even approached a victim to tip her off about her victimhood and shared her response with other members on the chat room. Some suspects dared to call or send texts to their victims only to disgrace them under the cover of anonymity.

A chat room also exists to automatically change an ordinary photo of a woman into one of a naked body in various positions. The number of its members in the chat room already surpassed 220,000. “It’s like coming across sex offenders as often as seeing taxis on the street,” said an X (formerly Twitter) user.

More shockingly, a considerable number of perpetrators of deepfake-based sexual violence are teenagers. In Telegram, there are chat rooms among middle and high school students on a regional basis. Recently in Busan, the police are looking into cases where four male middle school students created piles of illicit images of female students and teachers to share them in a chat room. It is an irony that the development of digital technology contributed to lowering the age of offenders.

Police data shows that 75.8 percent of criminal suspects for creating deepfake sexual images were in their teens, up from 65.3 percent in 2021 and 61 percent in 2022. As suspects in their 20s took up 20 percent, the two age groups account for a whopping 95.8 percent. The alarming phenomenon resulted from their skills in dealing with digital technology and their dismissal of serious criminality as being just play. To make matters worse, an increasing number of male students — and their female counterparts — do this against one another, which suggests the sad transformation of deepfake images into another form of school violence or harassment.

Experts are demanding a stricter punishment on deepfake-based sexual assaults. We must revise the law on sexual crimes to expand the scope of undercover investigation from juveniles to adults to effectively control the fast spread of deepfake crimes and punish not only the act of creating and spreading such images but also the act of possessing and watching them.

The reform calls for education. Without teaching people about the significance of healthy sexual relations and ethics — and without changing our sexually exploitative online culture — nothing will change. Newspaper articles on deepfake sex crimes often draw comments like “How can you think of dating a man solely based on trust?” Such cynicism is the very source of the deepening gender conflict, the hatred against the other sex, the pitifully low fertility rate, the unwillingness to get married and the deep-rooted distrust in law enforcement in our society.