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Cyberspace offers new opportunities for juvenile prostitution. Police on Tuesday cited the case of a high school dropout identified as Ahn (16), who met up with a 21-year-old university student at a DVD Internet cafe in Shinsa-dong in Seoul just hours after they met in an online chat room. The couple immediately moved to a private DVD room and started to have sex. Ahn was paid W70,000.
Ahn allegedly started to offer sex for money last September after seeing a TV news report about high-schoolers who were doing the same. After running away from home, Ahn opened a chat room to sell sex whenever she ran out of money. She arranged everything, including where and how to have sex, in the chat room, charging between W70,000 and W150,000. She was busted this month. A police officer said most of her clients were ordinary men in their 20s and 30s such as office workers and university students. The police arrested four men who they say had sex with Ahn.
A regular crackdown on juvenile prostitution from Dec. 22 last year revealed that over 90 percent is arranged through the Internet, the National Police Agency said. Some 155 out of 172 offenders made contact online. Police said despite strict controls over chat rooms that may serve as fronts for the underage sex trade, they are hard to detect as they use ˇ°deceptiveˇ± names. The reason the sex trade is mushrooming online is because offline brothels are closing due to draconian new laws, forcing potential customers to seek alternative ways to buy sex, they added.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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