The Legal Standard Courts Actually Apply
A South Korean media outlet recently reported on a
deepfake sexual abuse case involving a minor member of a girl group: someone
had digitally superimposed her face onto sexually explicit content. In that
case, the court declined to apply the law prosecutors wanted, the Act on the
Protection of Children and Youth from Sexual Abuse (I'll refer to it simply as
the “Youth Protection Act”). Instead, the court applied a different statute,
the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment of Sexual Violence Crimes.
Here's why the court reached that conclusion, and why the reasoning matters for
our society, and especially for parents.
Having reviewed the relevant Supreme Court precedents,
I've noticed a consistent pattern: even when a face is unmistakably that of a
minor, if the body shown in the image doesn't look like a minor's body, i.e.,
it's depicted as fully developed like an adult's, courts will not treat it as
child sexual abuse material under the Youth Protection Act. In other words, the
deciding factor is whether the body shown in the composite image can
objectively be recognized as belonging to a child or teenager. If only the face
looks somewhat youthful while the body does not, that conduct is prosecuted
instead as the unlawful editing and distribution of a fabricated video or image
under the Sexual Violence Punishment Act, not the Youth Protection Act.
Last August, the Third Division of Korea's Supreme
Court explained that under Article 2(5) of the Youth Protection Act, “child
sexual abuse material featuring children and youth” means content depicting an
actual child or teenager engaged in sexual acts, such as intercourse or similar
conduct, not merely an image that evokes a child. The Court went on to explain
that whether a composite photo qualifies as material that can be “clearly
recognized as depicting a child or youth” has to be judged by weighing the
law's purpose, which is to strictly regulate the sexual objectification of
minors, together with all the surrounding facts. Those facts include the
depicted person's appearance and physical development, the person's actual age
and identity, how and why the composite was created, and the background and
setting of the image.
An Ambiguous Standard, Confusing Outcomes
Here's the problem: both the Supreme Court and the lower courts keep issuing rulings on similar facts that are, frankly, vague. As a result, even attorneys who handle these cases regularly often struggle to pin down exactly where the line falls. The Supreme Court's language, weighing “appearance and physical development, among other factors,” sounds reasonable enough in the abstract, but it doesn't tell you how developed a body has to look before it stops counting as a minor's. In this particular case, defense attorneys argued that when the face and age of the person depicted are already widely known to the public, because she's a celebrity, the public can recognize her as a minor regardless of how her body is rendered in the image. That criticism captures exactly why the current standard is a problem: it simply isn't clear enough.
How Deepfakes Are Spreading Among Teens
Deepfake content has exploded recently. In particular,
there's been a sharp rise in ordinary photos posted on social media being
manipulated into sexual images or videos. As AI tools make this kind of
manipulation easier for anyone to pull off, the pace at which this content is
spreading has reached a genuinely alarming level.
It's tempting to assume adults are behind most of this
content, but in reality, a substantial share of it is created and shared among
teenagers themselves. Boys, in particular, go through puberty at an age when
curiosity about sex spikes dramatically, while their judgment and sense of
ethics haven't yet caught up to an adult level. As a result, it isn't uncommon
for a teenage boy to make one of these images out of what feels to him like a
joke or idle curiosity, without grasping the seriousness of what he's actually
doing.
What This Means for Parents
Reports of school violence tied to this kind of
conduct are climbing as well. If you're raising a son, it's worth having a
frank conversation with him about this well before puberty even begins. Korean
households tend to take a fairly conservative approach to sex education, which
often means kids don't receive much of it at home at all. Left to figure things
out on their own, they end up encountering explicit content through social
media, and then run into trouble when they pass it along to friends, sometimes
landing them in a school violence investigation. And because deepfake tools
have made it so easy to turn an ordinary photo of a classmate into a sexualized
image, that risk is only growing. Parents of sons could, without any warning,
one day learn that their child has been reported for a deepfake-related school
violence incident, and that is a genuinely disorienting call to receive.
The rise of deepfake technology is raising new legal
and ethical questions for all of us. Courts clearly need to sharpen the
standards they use to decide these cases. But just as important is what happens
at home: honest, timely sex education and open conversations with your children
about this risk matter just as much as getting the legal standard right.
