South Korea’s pornography possession law, which aims to prevent child and adolescent sexual crimes, has been criticized for its ambiguity, logical contradictions, and lack of effectiveness.
Sexual assaults on children and adolescents, including child sexual assault cases, have become a growing social issue in South Korea. What these cases have in common is that the suspect habitually possessed and used pornographic materials related to children and adolescents. In response, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family enacted the new Possession of Child and Youth-Related Pornography Act on September 16, 2012.
The purpose of this law is to reduce the rate of child and youth sexual offenses by proactively identifying potential child and youth sexual offenders and applying legal sanctions to them. Of course, this law may help identify sex offenders as intended. However, there are a number of problems and logical fallacies with the bill. In this article, I’ll point out the problems and logical fallacies with the bill and discuss the need to reform it.
First, let’s look at the problems with the bill.
The first problem is that the criteria for penalization is very vague and unjust. The bill specifies that media (including films, videos, games, or images or videos through computer or telecommunication media) that depict sexual intercourse, simulated sexual intercourse, touching or exposing all or part of the body, causing sexual shame or disgust in the general public, masturbation, or other sexual acts, with characters or representations that can be perceived as children or adolescents, are criminalized. While this list seems clear, there are many exceptions to the law.
For example, in the Japanese anime “Changu can’t be stopped,” there is a scene in which the main character, a kindergarten student, exposes her body parts. However, because the scene is not socially perceived as indecent, it is not punishable under the law. Exceptions like this are often based on non-objective social norms. In some cases, individual perceptions, which are more subjective than societal norms, are the criterion. Just because a character is wearing an expression that could be perceived as a child or adolescent (a school uniform) does not mean that they will be penalized; the criterion is whether the character engages in obscene behavior. Even if the person is wearing a school uniform and engaging in obscene behavior, if the person is not perceived as a child or adolescent, they will not be punished. This is a very vague standard.
The second problem is that the number of people who are actually penalized is extremely small compared to the size of the population that meets the criteria. It is estimated that the number of people who could be penalized under this bill is at least in the millions. However, the number of people actually punished is in the tens of thousands. This raises the suspicion that a small sample of people are being punished to serve as a warning, “Beware, there’s a law like this.” For example, there are rumors that some portal sites require you to avoid answering calls from certain numbers to avoid the possibility of being punished by a small sample size. While this may be just a rumor, it does have some merit given the current state of affairs.
The third problem is that the bill only applies to “possession of child and youth pornography”. According to this law, anyone who downloads child and adolescent pornography via any communication medium or the internet and possesses it for even a short period of time will be punished. However, if you watch child and adolescent pornography on an adult site that offers live video, you won’t face any legal consequences because this behavior doesn’t fall under the penalty of “possession. The intent of the bill is to penalize all media that depicts indecent images of people who could be perceived as children and teens. However, penalizing only the specific act of “possession” is a blindfolded approach, which is the first logical fallacy of the bill. Let’s take a closer look at the bill’s logical fallacies.
The first logical fallacy of the bill stems from the third problem mentioned above. The intent of the bill is to sanction media that contains indecent images of people who could be perceived as children and adolescents, and to identify potential sexual predators by catching their users, thereby reducing the rate of child and adolescent sexual offenses. However, if the penalties are limited to “possession” of pornographic material, the intent of the bill will never be achieved. As mentioned earlier, the act of viewing live pornography is not sanctioned at all. Therefore, if only “possession” of pornography is sanctioned, most pornography users will turn to live pornography, which is not punishable. This means that the bill is unlikely to reduce the rate of sexual offenses as intended.
The second logical fallacy comes from the contradictory logic of the Ministry of Women and Family Affairs, which proposed the bill. In the past, the Ministry of Women and Family Affairs has strongly denied the notion that “the more immodestly dressed a woman is, the more likely she is to be targeted for sexual offenses,” which has led to protests. However, according to the bill, the logic is that “viewing media containing indecent acts by people who can be perceived as children and adolescents will lead to the targeting of people who can be perceived as children and adolescents in real life for sexual crimes. The two logics are at odds with each other. The logic of the bill is that if you see pornographic behavior of a certain person, you will feel lust for that person in real life, and the logic that the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family has denied in the past is that certain people are more likely to be targeted for sexual crimes. This can only be seen as an acknowledgement and rationalization of the broader logic that the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family Affairs, which proposed the bill, had previously denied.
Because of the above three problems, two logical fallacies, and other problems that we have not mentioned, the bill should be revised. The question is, in what way? We need to decide whether to build on the current law and improve it, or to completely revise it in a new direction. As we’ve seen, this bill has good intentions, but it’s a fuzzy concept. Even if we were to improve it and make it better, pornography users will still find other ways to access pornography, and if the law is strengthened and sanctions for pornography are increased, it is not unlikely that they will turn to more serious crimes, such as sexual assault or sex trafficking, to fulfill their sexual desires in other ways.
In researching the Child and Youth Pornography Sanctions Act for this article, it was easy to see that the law itself was built on an illogical premise. It is highly debatable that anyone who comes across child and youth pornography is a potential sexual predator. The bill is currently under review by the Constitutional Court. In my opinion, this controversial and problematic bill is likely to be ruled unconstitutional.
The law is a set of norms that members of a society live by. Good laws are reasonable and fair laws that everyone recognizes and trusts. If laws are enacted as a one-dimensional response to a specific case and as an alternative to silencing public opinion, such as the Child and Adolescent Pornography Sanctions Act discussed in this article, people will increasingly distrust them. To prevent this from happening, the process of enacting laws requires a lot of attention and criticism from members of society. I think we need to watch the enactment of laws with more interest, rather than accepting them indifferently just because there is a separate organization that enacts them.
