Abuse has far reaching consequences which affect mentally, psychological, and even emotional well-being. An abused person is generally kept penniless and is not given any opportunity to access money even if it is their own. Explain to who you are speaking to about the impact of abuse.
The abused individual is going to need all the help that they can get from those around them. If the people that they are counting on to support them end up being the one to dismiss them, recovery can be set back by years. A common misconception that people have about the notion of abusive relationships is that only significant others are capable of putting you in it.
Let us clear up that wrong notion today. An abusive relationship, by definition, involves the mistreatment of one person by another in the same unit of acquaintance, familiarity, and yes—relationship. Note how we defined it quite specifically and do not only refer to romantic relationships. This is because it is not only your significant other that is quite capable of putting you into an abusive relationship.
Family members are fully capable of putting you in an abusive relationship. Everyone has their own tale about overly controlling parents, bullying siblings, and even horrific extended families. Family members are usually at the very core of the development of our lives. It is they who are most around us when we are quite vulnerable that are fully capable of compromising our ability to tell whether something is healthy or abusive. Most people who end up in abusive romantic relationships commonly have had traumatic experiences in their childhood because of family members.
Friends are fully capable of putting you in an abusive relationship with them. There are friends that leech off of you, there are friends that manipulate you, and there are those that make you enthralled or beholden to them.
Just because you are not in a romantic relationship with a person that you meet does not mean that they do not have the capability and knowledge of you to overcome your better judgment. There is a reason why peer pressure is an existing blight upon human relationships. People who care will never put you in a situation where you are uncomfortable or against your will. When you are the recipient of abuse, it is often a bitter pill to swallow that it is we that helped our very abuser.
Today, we wanted to talk about how abused people end up helping their abusers. People who abuse others often use power and control to maintain the upper hand. It is often rather hard to think that the person who is on the receiving end of all that abuse actually does end up helping their abuser to maintain that control. There are a lot of different ways that the abused person ends up helping their abusers. Here are a few ways how:.
Abusive people often perceive silence as consent. If the abused person does not speak out or does not say that they do not like what is happening, the abuser ends up with a perceived green light. When an abused person keeps the truth of what is happening away from the knowledge of others, they end up empowering their abuser.
The veneer of happiness that you put on in order to hide the abuse and lie to people around you that you are fine is the very thing that empowers your abuser to do it again. We say these things not to accuse. We speak up about the realities that many are often try to avoid.
What we want is for people in abusive relationships to understand that they can actually end up helping their abusers. Knowing how they do so is a strong way to begin the process of breaking out of it. With this in mind, what ways do you think abused persons end up helping or empowering their abusers? Search for:. Abuse Report the Abuse August 22, 0 comments. Today, we are going to be discussing something that may be difficult to.
Abuse Signs. Report the Abuse August 8, 0 comments. Abuse Recovery. Report the Abuse July 25, 0 comments. Not Always a Significant Other: Others Who Can Put You in an Abusive Relationship A common misconception that people have about the notion of abusive relationships is that only significant others are capable of putting you in it.
An abusive relationship, by definition, involves the mistreatment of one person by another in the same unit of. I thought that maybe someone installed a camera while I was out or was watching me from nearby. I was very scared on the walk from the elevator…I felt so paranoid and afraid in public places.
There have been repeated incidents of illegal filming of women at universities. Shin Yun-jeong was filmed without her knowledge by a university classmate who at that time was a close friend. The perpetrator was caught after his male friends saw CDs in his room labelled with the names of female classmates. They became suspicious and notified authorities. The six CDs contained a separate folder for each of at least 16 victims.
Some cases of illegal filming occur in the workplace. A colleague of hers, a clinical pathologist, was arrested in August , and found to have filmed several colleagues, including A, in a changing room at the hospital.
Non-consensual capturing of images is deeply harmful even when the images are not shared. For victims, knowing that an intimate image exists and is in the hands of someone who has already behaved maliciously raises the possibility that the image could be shared at any time.
The perpetrator was sentenced to 10 months in prison; the prosecutor had requested 2 years. She said a prosecutor who later worked on the case was amazed that she had been able to find that exact clock online, given how many models there are.
After she reported the case to police, a male officer interrogated Lee Ye-rin for four hours demanding to know in detail what she had been doing in her bedroom during a period that was filmed, but afterwards she struggled to find out the status of the case. You never know. The first was in touch with her, requesting evidence and information from her, and sometimes sharing information about the status of the case.
But once the case was ready for trial, he told Lee Ye-rin it was no longer his case so he could not help with anything. The new prosecutor never contacted Lee Ye-rin:. She faced lasting impact from these experiences.
Intimate partners have opportunities to capture images illegally. She later gained access to his cloud storage where she found intimate images that seemed to be of sexual partners, including 4 of her.
The photos of her were of her in underwear—they had been taken without her knowledge or consent, on two occasions early in their relationship. The other photos were of two women Park Ji-young did not know, but who she assumed were ex-girlfriends; they had been photographed nude, while sleeping. After discovering the images, Park Ji-young decided to search for the other women in the photos.
She posted a note in a chat group at her university describing how she had found the images and seeking the women who were in them. She went to the police. But a lawyer assigned to help her repeatedly urged her to drop the case, cautioning that if the case went forward she could face criminal defamation charges because she had told others about the photos, and might also be accused of accessing his files without consent.
Park Ji-young was the target of months of pressure from her ex-boyfriend and his family after she reported him to the police. But he was still at university with Ji-young and she saw him there often. Individuals who have taken intimate photos of themselves, or agreed to others taking such photos, may live with fear that these photos could be shared at any time, and that they could be vulnerable to blackmail and coercion by people in possession of the images.
The question of whether a person consented to an image being taken is not always clear. For example, when the person depicted in the image is a child under the age of 18, a perpetrator requesting an intimate photo may be committing a crime regardless of whether the child agrees. In some cases, a perpetrator obtains an image or images consensually but then uses the threat of sharing those images to blackmail the person in the photo. This blackmail can take the form of demanding more sexually explicit images.
They recruited victims by posting fake advertisements seeking models. Applicants would provide their personal information, including addresses and identification numbers, and photos of themselves. There were at least victims, including 26 children. The Nth Room case is an example of a broader and dangerous trend. A lawyer representing survivors said she sees cases where the victim and the perpetrator have met on platforms that match people randomly to chat with each other.
Sohn Ji-won was 16 years old when she met someone online through a website that connects people randomly to chat. He said he was 24 years old, and pursued correspondence with her outside the chat program, then demanded sexual images from her.
She sent them but regretted it later, and when she tried to delete the images from their chat, he became angry and abusive. She said she had also communicated with other men, on Telegram, who pressured her into sending intimate photos, while promising to delete them immediately—only for her to later find one of the photos posted in a chat group. She does not know whether the perpetrators shared or uploaded the images, but she fears they did. When the goal of a perpetrator is to harm their victim, they sometimes post faked images online.
Intimate images are sometimes used by someone impersonating the person they are targeting. Two months after Kang Yu-jin ended a four-year relationship, she began receiving messages from strangers.
He sent her an image from Tumblr. The information included my address, the school where I had studied, the name of my job, the address of my job, and a photo of the exterior of the building where I lived. She went to the police but was told to return the next day. She went to see her ex, who several days later confessed that he was responsible and apologized, saying he had been angry and wanted to make it harder for her to meet a new partner.
Kang Yu-jin was initially reassured, but the abuse continued and escalated. He posted increasingly explicit sexual content, all while impersonating her, including faked images of her face merged with a semi-nude photo of another woman, photos of genitals and nude women, and footage of a woman and man having sex where the woman so closely resembled Kang Yu-jin that she initially thought it was her, as did people who knew her, she said.
With the images, he posted contact details for Kang Yu-jin, at work and at home, and for her parents, plus hashtags to draw the attention of people in her neighborhood.
In her case there were hundreds of images posted by her ex-partner, with more appearing all the time. She said all the platforms she dealt with required a separate, time-consuming request for each image, involving completing a form, with the link to the image and a justification for why it should be removed, and each request took her minutes:. She said some platforms respond quickly but Google was especially slow, taking several days or up to a week to remove abusive images. Even when she succeeded in having images removed from platforms like Instagram or Twitter, thumbnails of the image remained accessible through Google.
After images were removed, she said they sometimes reappeared weeks later, even when it appeared no one had reposted them. It was still the victim's problem to seek deletion. I want it too—send it to me! One of the shocking things about digital sex crimes is the extent to which interviewees described sharing and consumption of non-consensual images as being socially accepted among some men, without regard for how the person in the image is affected.
One perpetrator told me he felt when he did this he was recognized as a real man. When someone is caught, they see him as unlucky, because it is so widespread—they know many others not being caught. Non-consensual images are often shared in chat groups among men.
High profile male entertainers have faced scandals including allegations of digital sex crimes. Schools and universities do little to ensure appropriate conduct regarding sexual images. One survivor described how, when she was in middle school, someone played on the screen in the classroom a video of a classmate having sexual intercourse.
One of the challenges of tackling digital sex crimes is that many perpetrators reap financial rewards. The first type, he said, commits digital sex crimes for personal reasons. They can sell the footage, or earn money through ads, or both. And then they might be recruited [by a platform to provide more material].
He said he did it to make money to buy the newest iPhone. Growing awareness of the prevalence of digital sex crimes has affected even women and girls who have not, to their knowledge, been the target of abuses.
Perpetrators, such as those filming in toilets, sometimes choose their victims randomly. The impact of these random crimes is to make many women and girls feel deeply uncomfortable in, and excluded from, public spaces.
As one survey respondent wrote:. Digital sex crimes have an even deeper impact on survivors. Once a non-consensual image has been shared, or the victim simply worries it might be shared, the fear of the image appearing or reappearing hangs over the survivor indefinitely.
Succeeding in having the photos removed from specific websites provides no sense of security, as anyone who has ever viewed them could have taken a screen shot and can share that screen shot any time, on any websites, from which it may spread uncontrollably. There is no certain thing, like total deletion or deleting an image for good. That is the most difficult part regarding digital sex crimes.
Survivors of digital sex crimes grapple with trauma so deep that it can lead to suicide. This trauma is often worsened by retraumatizing encounters with police and other justice officials, and by the expectation, discussed below, that they should gather evidence for their case, and monitor the internet for new appearances of images of themselves, which leaves them immersed in the abuse.
They also face stigma which can harm their relationships and access to education and employment. Police, prosecutors, judges, and legislators—not to mention perpetrators—often seem not to comprehend the extent of the harm caused by digital sex crimes. When women hear about a suicide related to digital sex crimes, they cry. They do not lose their reputation. They do their normal life, and only the victims hide in the darkness. Survivors often face stigma and blame, especially if intimate images were taken with their consent or depict the survivor engaging in sexual conduct.
Rather when that kind of thing happens, they see a woman as a dirty slut, and tend to criticize her. As images spread, they can reach everyone the survivor knows.
One woman described how photos of her appeared first for sale on websites before spreading to a chat group, then to students at the university in her hometown. They had not yet reached her family, but she feared they soon could. Even when women and girls are filmed without their knowledge or consent, they sometimes face stigma. Shin Yun-jeong was among over a dozen women filmed—up their skirts and in other intrusive and sexualized ways—by a university classmate without their knowledge or consent.
She said that one of the women targeted panicked trying to avoid her parents finding out. Stigma encourages survivors to blame themselves. An interviewee who faced abuse from an ex-partner reflected while being interviewed that perhaps she put herself at risk by meeting a man online. Police sometimes release details specific enough to allow people to identify survivors, which can further harm them. This is hell. Survivors of digital sex crimes often find the experience leaves a pervasive impact on many aspects of their lives.
And only long dresses. She said when she cannot avoid using a bathroom outside her home, she looks for one in a reputable building with CCTV. Digital sex crimes can also drive women and girls off the internet, in an era, especially once the Covid pandemic hit, when the online world is increasingly essential for education, employment and social connection.
Survivors who knew they had been filmed or photographed without consent but who did not see the images taken of them sometimes found this more difficult than peers who had seen the images and had a full understanding of what had—or had not—been captured.
Women targeted by someone they know—or someone whose identity is unknown but who they believe must know them—are often particularly traumatized. He said footage of one of his clients in her home in underwear circulated five years earlier, and she had never figured out who had taken it.
She was so afraid of it happening again that she had moved repeatedly but, still feeling unsafe, lived inside a tent within her house and refused to use electricity. He said it was common for his clients to try to block any space in their home where a camera could be hidden, and to block all the windows. The expectation—discussed below—from police and prosecutors that survivors take the lead in gathering evidence compounds the trauma for many survivors. But at the same time, I was so frightened and afraid.
Even turning on the computer was very hard for me. So I was so terrified and I wanted to die. The justice process is also often traumatic, in ways that discourage survivors from coming forward. Then the court reviews the footage—the judge looks at did she say something suggesting consent, is she looking at the camera? All of this brings a lot of secondary damage to the victim. The impact of digital sex crimes is so devastating that many victims consider suicide and some die by suicide.
The CEO of a company that seeks to have content removed estimated that each year about four of his clients who are seeking help with having non-consensual intimate images removed die by suicide. It is so spreading—even though you try so hard, it keeps spreading.
There have been several widely reported cases of victims of digital sex crimes dying by suicide recently. Goo Hara, a famous singer and actor, died by suicide at age 28 in November He was found guilty of several offenses in August but received a suspended jail sentence.
The court found him not guilty of filming without consent because Goo Hara had remained in the relationship. Several survivors had decided to leave South Korea for reasons including their experience of digital sex crimes. I think that I have to survive in another country. A police detective described the experience of a woman she had met.
She said the woman was a university student when her boyfriend filmed them having sex. The footage was uploaded, tagged with her name and university, and spread widely.
She had plastic surgery to change her face. The head of a company that detects spycams said he often consults by phone with Korean female clients who have left the country, but still fear being surveilled, and he has traveled overseas several times to do searches of their homes for them in the countries where they have relocated.
Some survivors decide they will not engage in the future in any romantic or sexual relationships. So I feel sex and sexual intercourse is disgusting at this point… I quit all the sexual relationships, that is my personal solution.
I will not meet them. I will not marry them. I will not have any kind of relationship at all with a male. She said there are about members of the movement in her province who gather sometimes. The South Korean government has taken some steps to assist survivors of digital sex crimes. Some of these steps—especially the creation of a center to assist survivors—are positive models for other countries. She said the government struggled to figure out solutions and focused on deleting images, without understanding that images could re-appear at any time and broader measures were needed.
The internet community—or internet society—is a kind of public space where you have to put some governance. The South Korean government has revised legislation repeatedly in recent years to address digital sex crimes, but important gaps remain. Many of the experts Human Rights Watch interviewed highlighted what they saw as remaining gaps in what is considered a crime under the law.
They are fast to evolve while the law is a little bit slower to prevent or punish. You make a law regarding crime A, they invent crime B… We will always be slower, but we are making efforts.
A former government official said when they contact a website and request removal of non-consensual images, whether the website agrees to remove them or not often hinges on whether the website operator perceives the content as illegal—so decisions about criminal law provisions affect not only whether people can be prosecuted, but also whether survivors can successfully request suppression of content.
She argues for separating digital sex crimes from the issue of obscenity and regulating them through laws that focus on preventing invasion of privacy.
Experts raised concern that the law does not criminalize audio recordings made without consent including of sex , or impersonation of another person. In cases reviewed by Human Rights Watch, perpetrators sometimes seemed to carefully take advantage of the limits of the law, using innuendo to skirt defamation laws, and posting images that resembled their victims but were not actually them.
Experts also argued that the law should add greater nuance—for example, treating a defendant who shares a photo with one or several acquaintances differently from one who uploads, monetizes, and mass distributes images. There are many ways civil remedies could—and should—assist survivors of digital sex crimes.
They could also deter digital sex crimes by, for example, imposing financial consequences on perpetrators. Survivors of digital sex crimes often face financial harms resulting from lost employment, being forced to move, or having to pay for services to seek removal of images or detect spycams.
Judges can fine perpetrators but even when a perpetrator is forced to pay a fine, that money does not go to the victim. Civil remedies could be an important complement, and in some cases an alternative, to criminal prosecutions of digital sex crimes.
An effective system of civil remedies—and assistance to survivors in seeking them—could allow a survivor to sue someone who committed a digital sex crime against her. She could seek a court order requiring that the perpetrator or others in possession on non-consensual images cease circulating them and delete them. She could ask the court to order a perpetrator to take personal and financial responsibility for seeking removal of images from the internet, including by paying a company to provide this service.
She could seek monetary damages from a perpetrator for harm such as emotional distress, lost wages, costs for having images removed or searching for spycams, security costs, or having to move house. She could also bring suit against internet platforms that refused to remove non-consensual images. But these remedies are not in practice available to survivors in South Korea, who very rarely bring civil suits.
When a civil claim is brought based on facts that are also the subject of a criminal prosecution in South Korea, it is common practice to defer the civil action until conclusion of the criminal case. This means survivors cannot seek injunctive relief or financial compensation during the time when it may be most needed. Survivors are typically too exhausted and traumatized by the end of a criminal trial—and sometimes multiple appeals, over the course of several years—to initiate a new proceeding in civil court, even if the criminal case has established facts that would support such a case.
If a criminal case is dropped or the defendant is acquitted, a lawyer would typically not see it as feasible to bring a civil case. The South Korean government imposes censorship and barriers to human rights online, including a broad effort to block pornography.
South Korean law sets out types of content that no one may circulate through an information and communications network. The KCSC, with a staff of about people, has responsibility for reviewing content online to identify and order the removal of illegal content. Jiwon Sohn of Open Net said entities receiving takedown requests rarely fight because the language of the law is so broad that success is unlikely.
Eighty percent of those are websites; twenty percent are posts. Eighty percent of censorship is blocking and ordering internet service providers to block these websites. South Korean criminal law includes broad provisions making defamation a criminal offense, including in some situations criminalizing speech that is factually true.
Laws permitting civil causes of action in cases of defamation can be a helpful tool for survivors of digital sex crimes. A lawyer representing survivors of digital sex crimes said she has brought defamation claims on behalf of survivors who suffered secondary trauma due to their cases being widely publicized, leading to abuse against them. Human Rights Watch opposes all criminal defamation laws, which chill freedom of expression, as a disproportionate and unnecessary response to the need to protect reputations.
Criminal defamation laws can also harm survivors and block them from accessing justice. Several survivors described being told by police that they should not seek a criminal investigation because they could be accused of defamation.
In , the CEDAW Committee expressed concern over the low rate of prosecutions of perpetrators of digital sex crimes despite the increase in reported cases, as well as the leniency of punishments. Representatives of an organization assisting survivors said over 63 percent of cases in which they assist women do not result in any legal action.
Often it is because the survivor knows the punishment is very light and thinks the stress of going ahead with the case is not worth the likely outcome, or because the police refuse to investigate or behave in ways that retraumatize the survivor. Survivors seeking justice encounter barriers at every step of the process. One of the fundamental problems is that law enforcement officials—the vast majority of whom are men—often do not understand the severity of these crimes, and their impact.
Another factor discouraging survivors from seeking justice is that once a case is under investigation, law enforcement officials send updates via mail to their address, and this likely leads to people the survivor lives with becoming aware of the situation. A lawyer assisting survivors said another problem survivors face is the slowness of the process. A survivor, Lim Ye-ji, said while she was waiting to hear from police about her case, news outlets reported that an officer at the same police station and same unit she had sought help from—the department for women and juveniles—had been caught taking spycam images of women in public.
A fundamental problem with the criminal law response is that the punishments imposed are usually not proportionate to the harm inflicted on survivors of digital sex crimes. There was a consensus among the experts and survivors interviewed for this report that the sentences most convicted defendants receive are so low as to discourage survivors from reporting crimes and leave a sense of impunity even when the perpetrator was successfully prosecuted.
But judges can, and usually do, let convicted offenders off with a fine, often a small one, sometimes with the addition of counseling or community service. Government data shows that in the majority of cases where a report is accepted, a perpetrator is apprehended, and once a perpetrator is apprehended that person is usually prosecuted. The data from indicates while almost all of the 1, people who went to trial on charges of capturing intimate images without consent were convicted, 79 percent of those who were convicted received a suspended sentence, a fine, or a combination of the two.
Fifty-three percent received only a suspended sentence. A total of cases went to trial on these charges; resulted in convictions. Of these, 82 percent of the people convicted received a suspended sentence or a fine or a combination of the two, with the most common sentence for 53 percent of convicted defendants being just a fine.
In , out of 5, perpetrators who were arrested, only , or 2 percent, were imprisoned. In December , the Sentencing Commission adopted new sentencing guidelines for digital sex crimes, setting out criteria judges should apply when determining the length of imprisonment to impose.
Low sentences can make perpetrators feel they can commit further crimes with impunity even when they are known, and easily identified to law enforcement, by the women they target. Low sentences for digital sex crimes are in the context of a broader problem of low sentences and legislative gaps for gender-based violence in South Korea. In , the CEDAW Committee expressed concern because in South Korea in over 43 percent of cases involving protection orders did not lead to criminal punishment and that violation of protection orders incurred only an administrative fine.
Several survivors mentioned low punishments for rape in South Korea, explaining they did not expect the digital sex crimes they experienced to be taken seriously when rape is also disregarded. Survivors often contrasted what they saw as minimal punishments their perpetrators had received with the deep harm they had experienced. Organizations that women should contact—police, etcetera—are very male dominated so it is hard for women to go there.
The number of female police officers is so low that President Moon Jae-in pledged by the end of his term to increase the number to a dismal 15 percent. One reason why there are so few women police officers is that women face barriers to thriving within the police force.
A female detective told Human Rights Watch that she felt isolated, lonely, and passed over for promotions. Survivors of digital sex crimes often cited the lack of women in the criminal legal system, especially among police, as a factor in them feeling unable to access justice. Although the victims of digital sex crimes are overwhelmingly female, both sex crimes and cybercrime units within the police are overwhelmingly male.
Some survivors encountered all-male units. Sex crimes detectives work in teams of eight, with one female detective per team, but the number of female police is so low that they struggle to comply with a requirement that there should be a woman assigned to every sex crimes case. Survivors who sought help from police often described negative, and sometimes traumatic, experiences. A lawyer assisting survivors cited abusive conduct by police as a major factor in women choosing not to seek justice.
Investigators watch footage in front of the victim. They ask questions that are sexual harassment. Police often discourage survivors from filing cases, or refuse to accept cases, arguing that the survivor could face defamation charges, the sentence is very low, or it is impossible to solve a case involving a platform outside of South Korea. Even survivors who were eventually able to get police to investigate often had to seek help repeatedly and were turned away at first—and abuses often continued during the period when they were trying to convince the police to act, compounding their trauma.
Interrogations may be lengthy and intrusive, and some survivors described police taking an abusive tone. When Lim Ye-ji reported a digital sex crime, she said one of the officers read out an abusive message suggesting that she was selling sex five times, loudly, in front of a room full of his all-male colleagues.
Local police departments often feel they are not able to handle digital sex crimes cases, because of their complexity, and transfer the case to a district police station. Police typically tell victims to search for evidence—usually abusive images of themselves—and often make this a pre-condition for acting. Several survivors described being told by police that if they wanted anything done about their case, they needed to come back with stronger evidence.
Victims are under particular pressure to provide proof in cases involving an image that was created with their consent. The victim needs proof like an email from him—solid proof.
Searching for images and documenting evidence of the crimes deepened the trauma that many survivors experienced, as they were forced to view these images repeatedly and spend much of their time immersed in thinking about the abuse.
Searching for images of themselves often exposed them not only to those images, but also to non-consensual images of other women and other materials they found upsetting, including images of violence against women. Another problem is that while seeking to protect themselves, survivors may inadvertently destroy evidence.
Several survivors said their first reaction on seeing an abusive image of themselves—for example sent to their phone or in the phone or storage of a perpetrator—was to delete it. Others sought to have images removed by internet platforms and succeeded only to be later told by police that they had destroyed the evidence necessary to support criminal charges.
Another common complaint from survivors who had sought help from the police was that police did not follow up with them about how or whether the case was moving forward.
The new task force is no panacea, though. It is also overwhelmingly male, and according to an expert who assists survivors, often retraumatizes survivors despite training on gender sensitivity. Survivors of digital sex crimes encounter some similar challenges with prosecutors, including difficulty being believed, sexist conduct, and a lack of support and information as cases move ahead.
As previously noted, data for indicates that prosecutors dropped a high percentage They sit around and joke about it and rate the content—or the victims. Prosecutors often fail to keep survivors informed about the court process, leaving them struggling to access information about what is going on and feeling disempowered. Lim Ye-ji struggled to convince the police to act on her complaint.
The website informed her that the case had been dismissed because they could not identify the perpetrator, although Lim Ye-ji had a suspicion about who the perpetrator was and had shared this information with police.
According to Lim Ye-Ji, the Instagram account impersonating and abusing her online was still active at the time of interview. Survivors often struggle to even find out when court dates on the case involving them will take place. One survivor described being frustrated after finding out too late that she had missed the trial. Survivors of digital sex crimes often face pressure not to go to the police, or to drop a case, when the perpetrator and victim know each other.
Police, prosecutors, and judges often seem eager to avoid charges if survivors will agree. Defense attorneys representing perpetrators can directly contact victims to pressure them to withdraw the case or agree to an out-of-court settlement. Baek Su-yeon was among over a dozen young women filmed non-consensually by a university classmate; after he was arrested, his father called victims begging them to drop the charges.
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