3 in 10 Korean dating sites are used for teenage prostitution?

My vow to translate a Korean news article a day may seem to be off to a bad start, but then I did technically translate today’s article yesterday. Unfortunately for the blog, after translating it on the subway in the morning (and raising a few eyebrows with the subject matter), I went out drinking with a friend after work and haven’t had the energy to do anything but watch Transformers a chance to go near a computer until now. Also, just before I met my friend my wife called me to tell me that a guy who came to look at our apartment yesterday wants to move in ASAP, so that means I’ll be moving on Monday instead of 4-5 weeks as planned. So please forgive the lapse.

By the way, with that last post on a survey on sexual discrimination my blog got a record number of daily hits, and what’s more, StatCounter reports that more than 15% of visitors to the site didn’t immediately click back to their search engine when they realized it had much less porn than some of the post titles had led them to believe. So, I listen to my fans, and if sexual discrimination is what you want, then that’s what you’re going to get:

Seriously though, if you are interested then I recommend reading KoreaBeat’s translation of a Hankyoreh Newspaper article on sexual violence. But not before reading today’s translation of course, semi-related.

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For a (probably welcome) change, let me provide some background information on the subject, gradually moving from the tabloidish to the more academic. Of course, the obligatory link to the Wikipedia article on the subject is usually lightweight but couldn’t exactly be described as tabloidish, but then there was more information there then I expected, and it has just taught me what a “Juicy Girl” was. This may not sound like a big deal to those of you outside of Korea, but to any expat here it’s difficult not to notice the Juicy Girl line of clothing popular amongst Korean women for the last few years (although strangely not this summer). Until 5 minutes ago I thought that it was just yet another label with nonsensical English, not unknown in this part of the world, but learning that many Korean women are walking around in t-shirts that basically say “slut” definately makes me look at them in a new light. I wonder how many of them are aware of it? I doubt the term is well-known amongst Koreans who don’t go to the sort of bars they work.

Before I learned that, I was originally planning to start by mentioning the 2004 movie 사마리아/Samaria, with the English title Samaritan Girl, which I haven’t seen but I know deals with the subject of teenage prostitution in Korea. I recall that when it came out that these two posters below were used all over Korea to promote the movie, especially the former, and the Marmot pointed out that at the time the main actor Kwak Ji-Min was actually 6 months underage for photos like these to be shot of her (I can’t find one, but I think he can forgive the lack of a link). I think it’s quite symbolic of the Korean public’s hypocritical attitudes towards it that a movie about the naturally illegal but huge prostitution industry here was not only promoted using images of an underage virtually naked Korean girl, but that there wasn’t even a whisper of possible prosecutions, and the poster was happily reproduced in newspapers and on internet portal sites. Don’t get me wrong, I can think of more heinous things in Korea than the fact that the girl in the poster below was then 17 and a half (is that too honest?), but it just goes to show how arbitrarily the law is applied here.

(Hmmm…it would be difficult to talk about them otherwise, but come to think of it, is it hypocritical of me myself to sound disapproving of these posters being used all over Korea 3 years ago, but then having them on my own blog?)

The review on Wikipedia isn’t very enlightening: go here for a much better one, which is from the amazing site Koreanfilm.org which I’ll add to the blogroll as soon as this post is finished. If you’re interested in anything Korean at all, then you have to check that site out; personally it’s given me an interest in Korean cinema that I never had (I’ve still never seen a Korean movie I’d want to watch again and again), and I have a list of dozens of movies that I’m dying to watch now, which it would be difficult to find out about at all until I was fluent in Korean. Big thanks to SeoulMan for finding it for everyone.

I partially mention those movies because I was looking for an excuse to link to Koreanfilm.org after I had found it, but also partially because I’m not so sure that the picture they paint of teenage prostitution is any more or less reliable than that presented by academia. I say this because I have a physical, very academic, Korea Journal on the subject sitting on my shelf from 2003, bought back when great internet sites which you could get English books delivered to you cheaply in Korea from (like What the book – love you guys) didn’t exist, so trips to Seoul for me meant a day spent in Kyobo books and very full bags of books brought back to Jinju, some of which I’ve still got to read. But I was very much looking forward to reading that special edition on Korean cyberculture, which appeared to have such a huge effect on the 2002 presidential election but, flicking through it, I just had to start with “Cyberspace and Sexuality” by Chang Pilwha, pp. 35-60.

It started off good enough, but when I got to pp. 43-44, which deals directly with the internet and teenage prostitution, I wanted to go back to the store and return it, for it made the preposterous claim that in 2000, 1 in 4 female high school students in Busan had engaged in 원조교제, or “compensated dates,” ie had prostituted themselves (To be fair, she was citing another study: see here for more details). I admit that then (and now) I was quite happy to accept the Metropolitician’s figure of prostitution overall (not teenage prostitution) making up 4.1% of Korea’s GDP, but I thought that this 25% figure was the biggest heap of crap I’d ever heard, despite never working in a high school and so having no direct experience with Koreans in their late teens.

Now in 2007, after teaching 500 or so 19 year-old 재수 students for most of this year, while I’m sure the odd five maybe are not virgins, the vast majority behave like the kids they still are mentally, and I can now state for a fact that with being trapped in school and then institutes all day every day since they were 16, it would have been practically impossible for them to have found the time to arrange things, let alone go to love hotels and/or the clients’ cars, and in the unlikely event that they had then they would have fallen asleep the instant their head hit a pillow. Sure, there are plenty of 18 year-olds leaving institutes at 12.30 in the morning, but their mothers would know their timetables better than them because they’d have to kick their daughter’s asses to stick to it – I still can’t think of how it would be possible.

You could argue against this that my 재수 students are a privileged bunch whose parents pay a lot of money to send their children to the institute, and thus are the least likely to engage in prostitution, but what does that mean? The number of Busan high school students that don’t go to institutes, combined with the number of those that do but their parents don’t care about their daughters attendance despite the expense, would still not reach 25% of them. And pause for a moment about this line of thinking: put a different way, this would be to say that all Korean women that didn’t go to institutes during high school…are whores! Yes, it’s 11.50pm and I’m tired, but it would be! I can’t believe a professor, at Ehwa Women’s University no less, would make such a claim. It definitely ruins that place’s reputation for me.

Bear all this in mind when you read the following article, but please don’t get the impression that I don’t think that I’m trivializing the issue: given the size of the prostitution industry in Korea as a whole, then I’m sure the teenage component of it is still very big. But note that despite the alarmist headline, in this case the article doesn’t (and couldn’t really) give figures for how many much activity on the sites leads to actual prostitution in reality.

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애인대행 사이트 10개 중 3개 ‘청소년도 받아요‘

[중앙일보 2007-08-22 14:28]

[중앙일보 이지은] “전 17세 여. 경제적으로 큰 도움 주실 분 연락주세요”

애인 대행 사이트 10개 중 3개 이상은 청소년 가입이 가능하고 이중 아르바이트생을 구하는 의뢰인 50% 이상이 성매매(불건전 만남)를 요구하고 있는 것으로 나타났다.

국가청소년위원회는 최근 대구YWCA에 의뢰, 인터넷 포털을 통해 접근 가능한 69개 애인 대행 사이트를 모니터링 한 결과 이같이 나타났다고 22일 밝혔다. 청소위는 “애인대행 사이트에서 성매매 유인행위가 많이 일어나고 있어 청소년의 접근을 차단할 필요성이 있다”며 “성매매 등 불법ㆍ불건전 만남을 조장하는 애인대행 사이트에 청소년이 접속할 수 없도록 청소년 유해 매체물 지정을 추진하겠다”고 밝혔다.

청소년위의 조사 결과에 따르면 애인대행 사이트의 청소년의 가입이 가능한 경우는 23개로 33.3%를 차지했다. 이어 청소년의 가입은 불가지만 청소년 유해매체물 표시가 없는 경우가 42개(60.9%)였다. 청소년 연령 확인 및 접근 제한 장치가 있는 경우는 4개(5.8%)에 불과했다.

애인대행사이트에 게시된 내용은 ‘강남 지금 만나요’ ‘2:1 대행이요’ ‘경제적으로 큰 도움 주실 분’ ‘술 한잔 하실 분’ ‘밤새 놀려고 하는데 50만원 가지고 뭐하나’ 등 성매매 및 불건전 만남을 조장하는 내용이 대부분이었다.

또 대구YWCA가 2시간 동안 대화방을 개설한 결과 48명의 남성 이용자가 접근, 역할 대행을 의뢰했다. 이 중 성매매 요구가 25건(52%)으로 가장 많았고 홍보 및 대화가 19건(40%), 건전 대행 요구가 4건(8%) 등이었다.

주요 포털사이트는 ‘애인대행’ 단어를 금칙어로 적용, 성인인증 및 연령확인을 요구하고 있으나 ‘대행 알바’ ‘애인 알바’ 등 변칙적인 방법으로 올라오는 애인 대행 사이트에 대해서는 개별적인 조치를 취하고 있다.

청소년위는 “69개 애인대행사이트에 대해 청소년 유해성 여부를 심의하도록 정보통신윤리위원회에 요청할 것”이라며 “포털사이트에 대해서도 애인대행 등 금칙어 적용 및 성인인증을 요구할 계획”이라고 밝혔다.

이지은 기자
▶이지은 기자의 블로그 http://blog.joins.com/jelee_/

3 out of every 10 dating sites are being used by teenage prostitutes to find clients. [Jung-ang Ilbo]

[Jung-ang Ilbo, Lee Ji-Eun] “I am a 17 year old girl. If you can help me financially, please contact me.”

More than 3 out of 10 dating sites allow teenagers to register, and more than 50 percent of these registered teenagers are using the site immorally to solicit sexual services.

Recently, the Government Youth Comission asked Daegu YWCA to investigate to what extent teenagers were using 69 adult dating sites that can be found through major internet portals, and today they reported their findings. According to the Commission, “Making money through prostitution via these sites is a very alluring and attractive proposition for teenagers,” and that “the government needs to make greater effort to ensure that teenagers are prevented from gaining access to these sites which promote illegal prostitution and ‘unconditional meetings’.”

According to the Commission, 23 sites of the 69 sites (33.3%) allowed teenagers to register. 42 (60.9%) did not allow teenagers to join, but lacked a special warning indicating this; in the end, only 4 (5.8%) both didn’t allow teenagers to join and had the required software to prevent them from doing so (James – this unclarity isn’t my fault. Does this mean that teenagers could still join those 42 or not?)

Amongst the chat rooms and message boards of the 23 sites that did allow teenagers to register, you come across personal ads of teenagers, and men seeking them, with titles such as “Let’s meet in Gangnam now,” “2 for 1,” (James - your guess is as good as mine) “Seeking a sugar-daddy,” “Someone to have one drink with,” “I have 500,000 won, what am I going to do all night?,” and so forth, of which the vast majority are obviously for prostitution.

In addition, Daegu YWCA opened a chatroom on one site for 2 hours, and of 48 male users that entered, 25 were blatantly looked for teenage prostitutes, 19 chatted about sexual acts, and only 4 chatted about non-sexual subjects.

Major portal sites do not allow you to type in obvious search terms for teenage prostitutes, and require proof of your age. But both prostitutes and clients are adapting and choosing new terms to direct each other to their various chatrooms and sites instead.

The Commission concluded that they are going to request that the Korea Internet Safety Commission look more closely at these 69 sites for the sake of teenager’s welfare, and they will also ask the owners of the 69 sites studied to not allow the search terms used for prostitution that are already banned on internet portals to be used on their sites also.

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