Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Richy/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
A NEW REPORT by the Modern Women’s Foundation finds that 1 in 15 individuals in Taiwan has been recorded without their consent, while the lifetime prevalence of image-based sexual abuse is at 10.4%. The majority of such cases involve individuals being secretly filmed, with 6.8% of those 10.4% secretly filmed.
6,000 cases were found last year. One of these specific cases had 3,792 victims, pointing to how widespread image-based sexual abuse is in today’s society. It was raised that places where individuals are secretly recorded include in public venues, such as concert halls, bathrooms, hospitals, homes, and public toilets.
Other cases, however, involve the manipulation of images. A common example is face-swapping, in which individuals’ faces are put onto sexually explicit videos or images. The advent of AI has made such photo or video manipulation easier to carry out than ever. Other times, this can involve
The report emphasizes that the production, purchase, and distribution of such images have come to constitute a supply chain, with all those involved being victimizers. At the same time, the report noted that the persecution for such cases remains low. Out of 3,200 suspects, 1,393 led to the involvement of prosecutors, but only 591 were prosecuted, and fewer than 200 cases led to convictions.
The report, then, highlighted the harm done by image-based sexual abuse, in that people may be afraid to be in public spaces or interact with others, given that they do not know if others may have viewed an image of them that has spread online. Moreover, statistics suggest that there may be more than 790,000 victims of image-based sexual abuse each year, but there is often a culture of victim-blaming. And victims face challenges removing photos and videos when they have spread online.
The issue of image-based sexual abuse in Taiwan is one that has grown attendant with developments in technology. That image-based sexual abuse is on the rise is already known.
In 2021, news broke of a Telegram-based series of chat rooms in which sexual videos of minors were being shared and traded, which had more than 40,000 users. The case was termed Taiwan’s equivalent of the Nth Room case.
Personal information about the victims was also traded on the websites, including personal details, financial information, and information about their habits or places they frequently visited. This information was used to blackmail or extort some of these individuals, particularly if they are public figures. Members of the Taiwanese men’s basketball association, P. League+, founded in 2020, were among those blackmailed, with those blackmailed threatened with the release of sex videos or photos if they did not send their harassers signed jerseys or other merchandise.
Later on in the same year, a YouTuber nicknamed Xiao Yu was found to be running a deepfake ring that operated by combining the faces of women with porn actresses in adult videos. This includes public figures such as influencers Mrs. Science, Zamy Ding, and female politician, including Kao Chia-yu and Huang Jie. Members of the group could vote on their choice of the next public figure to make adult videos using the faces of, or commission the group to make videos of certain individuals, so long as there were enough photographs to use as material for the deepfake video. For some, this included individuals trying to make “revenge porn” videos of exes, or even their current partners.
Between four different groups that formed the network, there were around 8,000 users, who would pay an entrance fee of between 100 NT and 400 NT to join. As a result, the group would have generated at least 2,779,600 NT in income. In the wake of the incident, Executive Yuan spokesperson Lo Bing-cheng pointed to how existing laws lag behind the development of technology, with punishments for deepfakes remaining relatively light, and notions of sexual violence or harassment having failed to adapt to digital technology.
Indeed, image-based sexual abuse raises issues with technology platforms, in that sexual images can be shared on larger platforms that have dedicated professional moderation teams or on smaller platforms that may not have a clear legal entity, and do not have dedicated staff. This has led to challenges in the implementation of laws as the Digital Services Intermediary Act, with digital rights civil society groups criticizing that the law draft was inadequate to deal with these new and evolving challenges.
Future legislation, then, will have to deal with how new and emergent technologies have made image-based sexual abuse more challenging than ever to address. And it also remains to be seen how to change victim-blaming in Taiwanese society, as well as ensure that there is more stringent legal action taken on such issues.