'Semen terrorists' - men who ejaculate into women's belongings - have terrorized thousands in South Korea. Lawmakers want the offense labeled a sex crime.
South Korea has seen high-profile cases involving men damaging women's property by ejaculating onto it.
In May, a civil servant was fined $2,500 for ejaculating in a female colleague's coffee tumbler six times.
Lawmaker Baek Hye-ryun submitted a bill amendment asking that this behavior be classified as a sex crime, rather than property damage.
South Korea's lawmakers are looking to widen the scope of what can be considered a sex crime after a series of high-profile incidents where men secretly ejaculated onto and inside women's personal belongings.
Termed "semen terrorism" by Korea's web users, these cases involve men either ejaculating on a woman's property or putting an item containing said ejaculate on her person.
In May, a male civil servant in Seoul was fined $2,500 on the charge of "property damage" for ejaculating into the coffee cup of a female co-worker six times within six months, from January 20 to July 14 last year.
In 2019, a graduate student was jailed for three years on the charge of "attempted injury" for spiking a woman's coffee 54 times with a mix of semen, phlegm, laxatives, and aphrodisiacs in revenge for rebuffing his sexual advances, per Yonhap News.
And in 2018, Women's News reported on the case of a man who put a condom containing his semen into a woman's bag on a Seoul subway station. He was charged with property damage. In July,
Baek Hye-ryun, a lawmaker from South Korea's Democratic Party, submitted an amendment to South Korea's national assembly. Under this amendment, Baek is calling for "semen terrorism" - which falls under the category of "non-physical contact" - to be labeled a sex crime.
"The victim (in the coffee tumbler case) was sexually humiliated, but it was not considered a sex crime because it was not seen as involving direct physical contact," said Baek to The Guardian. "By charging the perpetrator with 'damage of property,' his act was judged to have infringed on the utility of the tumbler."
"Sex crimes need to be interpreted from the victim's point of view," Baek told The Guardian.
South Korea has in recent years seen major lapses in how sexual violence against women is addressed.
There has been an epidemic problem of men concealing small cameras in women's bathrooms, subways, and hotel rooms to film "molka," or hidden-camera porn. Of the 6,465 people reported for molka-related offenses in South Korea in 2019, 5,437 were arrested. But only 119 - or 2% - were convicted, per the BBC.
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