Child porn prevalent in Korea, but culprits face little punishment

Kim Jeom-deok, a 45-year-old man who is suspected of kidnapping and murdering a 10-year-old girl in Tongyeong, South Gyeongsang Province on July 16, has something in common with other child rapists and murderers.

Jeong Seong-hyeon, who abducted and killed two girls in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province, in 2008, was a porn maniac who had a collection of 780 pornographic movies and 441 nude photos of minors. Kim Soo-cheol, who entered an elementary school in broad daylight and kidnapped an 8-year-old girl and then raped and killed her, had watched 52 child porn movies the previous night.

Police confirmed Monday that Kim Jeom-deok also had 210 porn videos, including many depicting children, on his computer. The suspect was quoted as saying that after he picked her up on his truck at her request, he felt a sexual urge because she was wearing a short skirt. This suggests that a pedophilic desire arising from his indulgence in child pornography motivated him to commit the crime.

Child pornography is deemed anti-social content that could cause crimes, but is being spread widely through the Internet. On Web storage and person-to-person file sharing sites, it is easy to find pornographic materials produced by teenagers. Though the sites ban the use of search keywords related to child pornography, users can conduct searches just by using parts of such keywords.

Child pornography is also distributed at adult PC cafes in Korea whose main customers are men in their 40s and 50s. At one PC cafe in southern Seoul, each customer goes into his own compartmentalized private room to watch child pornography. The computers there have a “Lolita” category with a number of pornographic videos with provocative titles.

The U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation ranked Korea as the world’s sixth-largest producer of child pornography. When Korean police investigated three online storage service providers in 2010 for spreading such content, they discovered that some 40,000 downloads were made through the three sites alone.

Under the Child and Youth Protection Law, those who produce and distribute child pornography face up to seven years in prison and those who possess it up to 20 million won (17,423 U.S. dollars) in fines. Such punishment, however, has never been applied in a real case. All police did was to bust six file-sharing websites in 2010 that distributed child pornography.

Lee Won-sang, a researcher at the Korean Institute of Criminology, said, “Police sometimes accidentally find people possessing child pornography while investigating felony suspects. In reality, however, it`s difficult to nab those who possess or distribute child pornography,”

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