The Nth Room

Sunny Baek Y11 Mulchat

The story of a giant online pedophilial ring and its members who blackmailed young girls into becoming sex slaves

What are the Nth Rooms?

The Nth Rooms are a series of chat rooms on the Telegram where people who run the chatrooms post pornographic videos of young girls and users pay the administrators to be allowed into the rooms. Such content on the Nth Rooms was either forcefully filmed or filmed by the girls themselves under threat.

So how did they work?

Obviously, these administrators had to have some sort of advantage over these girls. So they collected personal information about their victims and blackmailed them with it. Some administrators (eg. 박사) did this by deceiving the victims that their accounts were hacked and that they could offer help whereas some (eg. 갓갓) did this by introducing the girls to a “part time job”. One of the members was a public servant who helped collect the personal information with an access to the government’s database. Such information was used to blackmail the girls into filming themselves performing dehumanising and gross sexual acts. One of the victims was forced to put live caterpillars into her vagina while another had to simulate having sex with her younger brother.

The Nth Rooms were first brought into the spotlight by two journalism students researching for a news topic. Since then, a women’s rights group infiltrated these chat rooms and has found more than eighty chat rooms and 260,000 users in these illegal chat rooms. This is particularly shocking as considering that Korea has 51,470,000 citizens, 260,000 users would suggest that 1 in 200 Korean citizens were in the Nth Rooms. Now it must be taken into account that one person could have been in multiple chat rooms and therefore the total number may be smaller than 260,000. However some argue that 260,000 was the number of people in the chatrooms discovered and that there could have been more chat rooms that were simply not discovered yet. Also, friends could have shared an account together as prices for entry to these rooms were expensive, ranging from 150,000 won to 800,000 won.

The sheer scale of this online pedophilial ring has led many people to question why it took so long for this to be given serious attention by the police force. In addition, there is a lot of frustration as to whether participants in this crime will be punished accordingly. As this type of digital sexual abuse is a completely new type of crime, there are no specific laws that dictate how participants should be punished and to what degree.

Punishments are decided upon in comparison to other similar crimes and lawmakers must evaluate whether digital sexual abuse is as traumatic and damaging to the victim as other types of sexual abuse such as rape. It is worth noting that although digital sexual abuse could leave lasting psychological damage to the victims and affect the victim’s chances at a normal life severely, it was not carried out physically by an offender. This might mean the criminals get a light sentence. Additionally, the stigma that follows victims of sexual abuse means that victims are hesitant to step forward to give their testimony of what happened in fear of being shunned by family and friends. This means that there is likely to be many more victims of the Nth Room who suffer in silence and perpetrators who will be able to get away with a lighter sentence.

This unprecedented type of crime that comes with the digital age has left the legal system with a blank. Let us hope that the future holds promise of stronger laws and more protection for our youth.

The Arrest of Harvey Weinstein and the Significance of the #MeToo Movement

Stella Han Y9 Noro

Who is Harvey Weinstein?

Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein is a former film producer and a convicted sex offender. He won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love and seven Tony Awards for plays and musicals including The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical, and August: Osage County. Ironically, as a famous public figure, he has fired the starting pistol for the MeToo movement to go around the world.

What is he accused of?

Harvey Weinstein has been sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault, on Feburery 24th 2020. Since October 2017, dozens of women have come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct including rape against Weinstein. Weinstein was found guilty of committing a first-degree criminal sexual act against a production assistant Miriam Haley in 2006 and of the third-degree rape of an aspiring actress Jessica Mann in 2013.

How was he convicted?

Allegations against Weinstein began to emerge in October 2017, when the New York Times first reported incidents dating back decades. In October 2017, following sexual abuse allegations, Weinstein was dismissed from his company and expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Weinstein issued an apology acknowledging he had “caused a lot of pain”, but disputed the charges against him. As dozens of more accusations emerged, Weinstein was sacked by the board of his company and banished from Hollywood.

A criminal investigation was launched in New York in late 2017, but Weinstein was not charged until May 2018 when he turned himself into police. During his trial, he was accused of forcing oral sex in 2006, rape in 2013. However, he was only prosecuted in 2020.

Six women took the witness stand in the rape trial

of Harvey Weinstein to offer descriptive accounts of how he had assaulted them in the last 30 years.

Two women were main witnesses of the case, their accusations representing the main five charges against Weinstein, of which two were rape cases, one of forcible oral sex and two of predatory sexual assault. The actress Annabella Sciorra, as the third witness, gave a testimony on the predatory sexual assault charge. Although Weinstein denied all charges, Weinstein’s trial is significant as the women stood up to voice out and to stand up for themselves, which wasn’t common in countless cases of sexual assault due to social taboo and criticism.

Why did it take so long?

The investigations of sex crimes are often unsuccessful and statistics show that only 46% of rapes occuring in the United States are being reported to the police and only 9% of those reported, result in prosecution. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, many aspiring actresses were unable to speak out for themselves, due to the suspect’s social status, in fear that speaking out would hinder their career. Even when women choose to speak out and start the prosecution, sex crimes are often hard to prove. Yet, it is crucial for women to know that their voices have power and that it will be listened to. Because Sexual abuse is aninherently private act , it is wholly reliant on the victim’s testimony.

The origin of the #MeToo movement

In 2006, Activist Tarana Burke founds the nonprofit organization Just Be Inc., to serve survivors of sexual harassment and abuse. Burke called her nonprofit’s movement “Me Too.” The phrase has been reignited as the slogan of the anti-sexual harassment movement.

In many cases of sexual assaults, we tried to find the victim and go on about why they were harassed, what they did which got them harassed, without realising that we should have been talking about what the perpetrator did was inhumane and wrong. With the MeToo movement countless convicts were brought to the table and we were able to see that sexual harassment often happened in relationships with power imbalance. This made it very hard for the victim to speak up.

The #MeToo movement was significant as it created an environment where women could start reclaiming rights over their own autonomy and demand for closures.

Discrimination In Arts

• Book Review: The Bell Jar

• The Tale of Misogyny • Dua Lipa- Boys Will Be Boys • Sexism in K-Pop

Book Review: The Bell Jar

Sophia Park Y8 Jeoji

The novel The Bell Jar by Sylvia Path is about a woman called Esther Greenwood, who suffers a mental illness. Through Esther’s experience, Sylvia Path explores the idea of feminism.

The first message is stereotypes are broken in this story. Many see females as a fragile, calm and elegant gender. But, the book claims it is just a misconception. Both genders are capable of doing the same things. It isn’t like one gender to be destined to do one particular job. However, history displays the females as the weaker gender, enforcing passive attitudes on modern women. The passive attitudes make females think that they are only doing certain things that won’t cause a lot of trouble. This makes others think that females should always keep in place, and not go to any other places where they are not settled.

The second message is that a woman should also be able to search for her own identity. Esther goes to find out who she really is -- a process that everyone goes through in their lives. But in the setting of the

novel, it isn’t appreciated for women to find her identity. The society’s definition of a “successful woman” was a great housewife who follows the rules of the household, and nothing more.

Despite the strong feminist message in the story, there are some parts that are not appropriate. Some argue that this book only discusses white feminism, refusing to classify The Bell Jar as a feminist book. White feminism is a branch of feminism that only regards the comfort and safety of white or uppermiddle-class women, sometimes at the expense of women of colour or of the lower class. Like this, throughout the story, when Esther is looking through her reflection, she tends to compare with other races.

I think The Bell Jar is a fine book to learn about the key concepts of feminism. However, women need to support each other, not take one down. To support each other, I believe is the concept left out in this novel.