\n<\/p>\n
Anger is growing on Chinese social media after news reports revealed the existence of online groups, said to involve hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, which shared photographs of women, including sexually explicit ones, taken without their consent.<\/p>\n
The Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily published a report last week about a group on the encrypted messaging app Telegram called \u201cMaskPark tree hole forum\u201d. It said it had more than 100,000 members and was \u201ccomprised entirely of Chinese men\u201d.<\/p>\n
Men reportedly shared sexually explicit images of women either in intimate settings or with so-called \u201cpinhole cameras\u201d that can be hidden in everyday items such as plug sockets and shoes.<\/p>\n
The scandal has been compared to South Korea\u2019s \u201cNth Room\u201d case, in which women were blackmailed into sharing sexually explicit photographs of themselves with members of a Telegram group.<\/p>\n
Telegram is blocked in China but can be accessed by using a virtual private network, or VPN, which circumvents location controls.<\/p>\n
Hashtags related to the scandal clocked up more than 11m views on the social media platform Weibo by Thursday. But there are signs the online conversation is being censored, with some relevant searches returning the result: \u201cAccording to the relevant laws and regulations, this content cannot be shown.\u201d Reuters reported earlier in the week that associated hashtags had received more than 270m views.<\/p>\n
\u201cA woman\u2019s life is not a man\u2019s erotic novel,\u201d wrote one user on Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like platform also known as RedNote.<\/p>\n
Another user on Xiaohongshu, an app predominantly used by women, wrote: \u201cSo scary! After seeing this, I\u2019ve decided if the MaskPark incident isn\u2019t properly addressed, I\u2019ll never get married or have kids.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the South Korean case, the mastermind of the chat group was eventually sentenced to 40 years in prison.<\/p>\n
In China, the penalty for taking pictures of someone without their consent is up to 10 days\u2019 detention and a 500 yuan (\u00a353) fine. People who disseminate pornographic material can be sentenced to up to two years in prison.<\/p>\n
The MaskPark scandal is not the first time men have been discovered to be secretly filming women. Last year, the boss of a tech company in Beijing was found to have secretly recorded more than 10,000 videos of his female employees using the bathroom. He was detained for 10 days as a punishment. \u201cTen days is nothing short of encouragement,\u201d one Weibo user wrote.<\/p>\n
Lao Dongyan, a criminal law professor at Tsinghua University, wrote on Weibo that Chinese law punished the dissemination of secretly \u2013 filmed material as an obscenity offence rather than a violation of women\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe women who were secretly filmed are the primary victims. Simply treating them as obscene materials is tantamount to treating them as the parties involved in pornographic works. This is absurd,\u201d Lao wrote.<\/p>\n
Speaking out about feminism and women\u2019s rights has become increasingly difficult in China as the government has cracked down on civil society and activism. But some women have found ways to address misogyny in public. One method is through comedy.<\/p>\n
On a recent episode of a popular standup comedy television show, The King of Standup Comedy, the comedian Huang Yijin joked that she wore make-up even when alone in hotel rooms: \u201cWhenever I\u2019m in a hotel, I just assume there are hidden cameras \u2026 There are about 2 million people in my room,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Anger is growing on Chinese social media after news reports revealed the existence of online groups, said to involve hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, which shared photographs of women, including sexually explicit ones, taken without their consent. The Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily published a report last week about a group on the encrypted<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13397,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[7072,2153,7074,1860,5579,1186,4605,4000,7073,418],"class_list":{"0":"post-13396","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-anger","9":"tag-china","10":"tag-explicit","11":"tag-groups","12":"tag-grows","13":"tag-online","14":"tag-photos","15":"tag-reports","16":"tag-sharing","17":"tag-women"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}