Twenty Euros and a Bathroom Stall

The cameras cost twenty euros. You can buy them in electronics shops or online, no questions asked. They’re small enough to fit behind a ventilation slat, inside a coat hook, beneath a toilet rim. In South Korea, they end up in public restrooms at a rate that constitutes, by any honest accounting, a public health crisis.

South Korea has built one of the world’s most impressive technological infrastructures, and that infrastructure is being used to film women in bathrooms without their knowledge. Men install miniature cameras, record the footage, and either sell it or post it for free—which is in some ways worse, because it means even money isn’t changing hands, just contempt. The market exists because demand exists, and the demand is the problem, and the problem is everywhere.

Women like Soo-yuen Park are doing something about it. Volunteer groups sweep public restrooms with infrared detectors. Advocacy organizations document cases and pressure a government that has historically treated this as a minor offense rather than the sustained violation it is. The BBC made a short documentary about Park and the women around her—people who decided, reasonably, that waiting for the system to protect them was not going to work.

What stays with me is how simple the mechanics are. Cheap cameras, lax enforcement, a culture of impunity built on the assumption that this is what men do and women should navigate around it. The technology didn’t create that assumption. It just gave it a new tool and a distribution channel.