Flowers of Fire by Hawon Jung

Author:Hawon Jung
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637742426
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2022-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

In July 2019, student journalists Dan and Bul were trying to report on where spycam voyeurs had migrated to after the Hyehwa protests prompted tighter restrictions on many popular channels like webhard and overseas-based porn sites.

Like many in her generation, Dan grew up seeing spycam crimes making daily headlines, men filming women—including herself—on the streets, and even a video titled after her school circulating on the internet as “a room of an XXX university girl.”

“This sense that absolutely no one is safe made so many women like me feel the spycam porn issue on a deeply personal level,” Dan told me.

“Plus, our work didn’t exist in a vacuum,” she continued. “There were so many people who came and fought before us … Everyone shared the same fear that ‘next time, it could be me,’ and that’s how we could build this activism against digital sex crimes.”

With that in mind, the two classmates paired up under the name “Team Flame,” a nod to the phrase “Flames, not flowers” that had been often chanted at the Hyehwa protests.

It took only hours for the two to enter the vast, vibrant, and interwoven ecosystem of spycam chatrooms on Telegram, the new platform of choice among young voyeurs lured by its promise of near-total anonymity.†

A quick search had led them to a Google blog whose owner shared “reviews” of spycam videos—including personal details and bleak fates of the victims—and legal tips on how to avoid police crackdowns. The blogger, then a thirty-eight-year-old office worker nicknamed “Watchman,” also published a link to his Telegram chatroom, a portal into the universe of nearly a hundred other chatrooms.

In the “Gotham Room,” thousands of voyeurs mingled together to chat about the latest spycam videos, verbally abuse victims, or share tips on how to join more popular, exclusive chatrooms. From there, many found ways to other chatrooms, where countless abusive materials—from rape footage to spycam photos of schoolgirls—were constantly shared. Chatrooms dedicated to sharing violent rape fantasies along with personal details and photoshopped sexual images of women, often the uploaders’ acquaintances, were so common that there were different rooms based on the profession of victims, including schoolteachers and police officers.

In one chatroom, Bul recognized the Telegram ID of a male acquaintance chatting among the other users. In another chatroom aimed at “violating college girls,” the duo saw evidence of one of their own classmates being abused. According to Team Flame’s own count, nearly three thousand spycam photos and videos were shared in just one of the chatrooms, while the “Gotham Room” alone had at one point over seven thousand participants.

“It felt almost surreal that you could find your way to these chatrooms so easily and seamlessly, only after a few minutes of googling and [finding] a blog that had thrived despite its violent content that encouraged illegal activities,” Dan said. “Anyone, say, a thirteen-year-old boy with a smartphone, could have found these chatrooms faster than I did—if they hadn’t found them already.”

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