In Conversation with Hawon Jung
4 May 2023
9DASHLINE recently had the chance to speak with Hawon Jung about her important new book Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide.
Drawing on on-the-ground reporting and interviews with many women activists and leaders in South Korea, Jung illuminates the strength and tenacity of these women, too often sidelined in global conversations about feminism and gender equality.
In your book, you describe in detail how Korea has faced an epidemic of spycam voyeurism and digital sex crime going back decades, with feminist activists struggling to gain real attention or action from official institutions. Why are these crimes so widespread? And what do you think should be done to address this horrifying situation?
HJ: Spycam porn crimes and other tech-based sexual abuse, often dubbed ‘digital sex crimes’ in South Korea, are actually not unique to the country. Such abuse is a worldwide concern, being called by different names in different places, such as ‘non-consensual pornography’ in the US, and ‘image-based sexual abuse’ in the UK. But it is true that the situation in South Korea, where about 6,000 spycam porn crimes are reported each year, is more extreme than in many other places. I think a comment by one college professor I talked to characterises the situation quite well: “A wrong marriage between fast-changing technology and slow-moving patriarchal culture”.
South Korea is a technologically advanced country that punches above its weight in terms of high-speed internet, smartphone penetration rates, and other tech-related infrastructures. But at the same time, the country still remains a relatively conservative society whose record on women’s rights has failed to keep up with its economic and technological advances. Also, as demonstrated by the country’s reputation as a world capital of plastic surgery, women face enormous pressure to look a certain way and are subjected to relentlessly harsh beauty standards — a reminder of how widely women are viewed as sexual objects. Spycam porn crimes have run rampant in this social climate.
The country has made some progress in recent years by defining many forms of tech-based sexual abuse as criminal offences, toughening punishments, and offering new protection for victims. South Korea even runs a state-funded help centre for victims of such abuse, where officials arrange legal and psychological support, work with law enforcement authorities to catch offenders and remove sexually abusive images from the internet on behalf of victims. But we still have a long way to go. Despite many legal changes in recent years, the country’s justice system, including prosecutors and judges, is often criticised for letting abusers get away with a slap on the wrist. And as one official at the aforementioned state-run help centre once told me, unless society changes the culture of sexually objectifying women, what these officials are doing is “nothing more than sweeping snow during a snowstorm”.
Efforts to tackle this culture should start early with strengthening gender equality education in schools. The next generation must be taught that women deserve equal rights and dignity as men. Children should also be taught about the dangers of tech-based harassment and how to respond when witnessing or falling victim to such abuse. There also should be more education for lawmakers and members of the justice system — including police, prosecutors, court judges, and lawyers — about the harms of such abuse, ways to protect victims, and how to properly respond to stem such crimes. Tech companies should also be properly regulated to stem the tide of sexually abusive materials flooding their platforms. Ironically, since such crimes became rampant in South Korea relatively early, the country has also taken steps towards addressing this problem before many other countries. Taking what has happened in South Korea as a cautionary tale, I hope other countries could follow suit and take necessary actions.
As you explain, corporations (especially social media and file storage companies) and state regulators are complicit in the persistence of these crimes. Worse yet, even school teachers and siblings cannot be trusted not to violate the privacy of women. How has this affected social ties and trust in South Korean society?
HJ: I am not aware of any research done on how — or whether — the prevalence of spycam porn has affected overall social ties in South Korea yet. But the epidemic of spycam porn crimes has certainly created a high level of anxiety and paranoia among women in their daily lives. I myself avoid going to women’s bathrooms that seem more open to the public and less monitored by the authorities. If I visit such bathrooms, I look around inside the toilet to see if there are any odd-looking holes in the walls or suspicious objects like a takeaway coffee cup or a bag of air freshener (both have been used to film women inside toilets in the past). And I’m not alone. One survey showed that nearly 90 per cent of women in the capital city of Seoul were afraid of spycams in their daily lives, and another study showed that women were more likely to take certain protective measures than men, such as looking for holes in the walls inside toilet stalls, examining toilet seats, or moving a trash bin in the toilet stall in case there’s a hidden camera inside. So much so that the government even requires all handset makers in South Korea to ensure that their devices make a shutter sound when taking photos.
Regarding abortions, you write "If debates over abortion in the West often boiled down to religious conservatism versus women’s-rights activism, South Korea’s history with abortion was anything but". Could you briefly explain what makes abortion discussions in South Korea different to those in Western states? Also, how do South Korean measures to counter declining birth rates compare to China’s and Japan’s approaches?
HJ: In many Western countries, anti-abortion campaigns have been driven by conservative religious groups, while pro-abortion campaigns have been led by women’s rights advocates. But in South Korea, abortion has largely been used as a policy tool by the government to control the population depending on its needs, a situation that is similar to China’s. For instance, the South Korean government widely encouraged abortions through the 1960s and 80s as part of its economic development plan, arguing that overpopulation would fan poverty (the campaign was funded by many in the US who believed that overpopulation in the so-called ‘Third World’ would lead to poverty and eventually the global spread of communism). Many women who had endured the crushing burden of childcare and household chores in large families benefited from the “family planning” campaign to a degree. But still, abortion then was largely considered a duty imposed on women by the government, not a right they could exercise on their own terms.
After South Korea modernised and as its birth rates sank to a level deemed detrimental to the economy in the 2010s, state policy took a U-turn and the government started cracking down on abortion (until then, abortion had largely been a criminal offence on paper only). The move, however, not only backfired among women but also prompted many of them to campaign to decriminalise abortion entirely. In the end, the country’s Constitutional Court declared the law criminalising abortion unconstitutional in 2019, making abortion legal.
To boost birth rates, the government has spent tens of billions of dollars to encourage more people to marry and give birth, offering financial subsidies to new parents and couples going through fertility treatments, and helping build more daycares and kindergartens. The situation in Japan — and the response by its government — is similar to Korea’s, which critics in both countries often sum up as simply throwing more money at people. But these measures have had little success so far and have failed to tackle the more fundamental problems behind the birth rate woes. Those problems include notoriously long working hours, cutthroat competition in school education, and a workplace culture that makes childrearing and a good work-life balance an unaffordable luxury for many. The situation is compounded by the extremely uneven division of household labour between men and women, widespread workplace discrimination against women, especially working moms, and conservative social norms that shame and stigmatise birth out of wedlock.
Meanwhile, China, which long encouraged — in some cases enforced — abortions to maintain its strict one-child rule, has not only abandoned the rule but also started to put new restrictions on abortions as its birth rates plummeted. It has also taken similar actions to Japan and South Korea, like offering cash assistance for new parents and making fertility treatments more accessible. But again, these measures have also been criticised for falling short of addressing the root causes of the problem, many of which are similar to those in South Korea and Japan.
How do Korean feminists' struggle for emancipation intersect with efforts by queer communities and activists in South Korea?
HJ: LGBTQ activism has been closely linked with the country’s modern-day feminist movement, especially since the 1990s when sexual minorities became more visible and outspoken on college campuses and the internet, and the notion of sexual minorities gained more traction among the general public. Women’s rights groups have often fought together with queer rights groups for better treatment of sexual minorities and women in society. Together they have campaigned, albeit unsuccessfully so far, to have the anti-discrimination law enacted, and to have a wider range of companionships — such as people living together without getting married — recognised as a legal family. They have also collectively pushed back against the anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion campaigns by conservative evangelical church groups that have huge political lobbying power.
However, there has been tension between queer groups and some young internet feminists who are hostile to transgender women in recent years. Described as trans-exclusionary radical feminists or gender-critical feminists (like in many other countries), this group of women believe that transgender women erase or pose threats to cisgender women in many public spheres. In South Korea, these women have often accused mainstream women’s groups of having lost focus by allying with other groups like labour rights activists, or even queer rights campaigners, and vowed to support “biological women only”. It is unclear how many women share the same stance on transgender women, but the view has been widely rejected by the mainstream feminist groups in South Korea and those who view solidarity with sexual minorities as a key part of the fight against patriarchy.
Nearly one year into office, has Yoon Suk-yeol kept the anti-feminist promises of his election campaign?
HJ: Not entirely. Yoon’s key campaign promise of dismantling the gender equality ministry has not materialised yet because doing so requires approval by the parliament, where the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) has a majority and opposes dismantling the ministry. But since he took office, the country’s political climate and policy directions have taken a sharp U-turn to cater to one of Yoon’s key constituencies during the presidential election — young male voters resentful of feminism — and to emphasise women’s traditional role as mothers and family caregivers.
For instance, after Yoon’s rightwing party vowed to replace the gender equality ministry with a smaller office responsible for, among other things, “population and family”, several local state offices that had previously promoted policies for women rebranded themselves as those focused on population, family, or child care instead. At the same time, gender equality, once cited as a solution to ease the low birth rate crisis under the previous administration, has largely disappeared from policy discussions. In fact, the government recently even decided to remove the term “gender equality” and references to sexual minorities from school textbooks.
In other cases, the government abruptly axed a plan to discuss ways for allowing more diverse companionships as families and cancelled funding for a youth programme to promote gender equality. And when participants of the programme protested, a senior lawmaker of Yoon’s party publicly retorted, “If you find gender equality and feminism so important, you can do it with your own money and time”. The list of such episodes is long and growing, stoking concerns that small progresses made for women’s rights in recent years are coming under threat, and this new, toxic political climate could have a chilling effect on efforts to curb the vast gender inequality in the country.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Hawon Jung is the author of Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide and a former Agence France-Presse reporter in Seoul. Her coverage of South Korea’s #MeToo movement was shortlisted in the 2019 Awards for Editorial Excellence by the Society of Publishers in Asia, and her writings have been featured in the New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Al Jazeera, among others.