Son Jong-woo, who runs a child porn site, spent only 18 months in prison in South Korea, the sentence is too light for the West.

Son, 23, could face more severe penalties in the US, where officials accused him of nine counts, including child pornography and money laundering. The US is seeking to extradite Son to the country for trial, but the South Korean Justice Department has not commented on the possibility of bringing him to the United States.

South Korea is the place where the majority of child pornography is posted and viewed, but the penalties for these offenses are smaller than in many other countries. Some South Korean ruling party MPs called for stricter punishments for crimes relating to child pornography and child sexual abuse because of public outrage over these cases.

While the maximum penalty for producing and distributing child pornography in Korea is equivalent to international standards, the punishment for owning child pornography is light and the court rarely Maximum sentence imposed. Experts explain that Korean law has no specific pronouncement of verdict for judges, so the court relies on precedent to make decisions and cases that have always been punished lightly.

In Korea, viewing child pornography is only considered to be equivalent to indecent public dress, said Jang Da-hye, a researcher at the Korea Institute of Criminology. Child sexual abuse is considered a crime that needs to be prevented to maintain social order, rather than protecting vulnerable innocent children.

"In East Asia, people tend to see crime from the perpetrator's perspective instead of the victim," said Ha Sora, an assistant to a ruling party congressman. "They also have less respect for women's rights than in the West."

In the early 2000s, more than 50% of Korean prostitutes were minors, and this led many to believe that some abusive minors actually voluntarily engage in such acts for money. should be protected.

"What must we ask ourselves in society that has made these happen?" Lee Ha-young, a women's rights activist, told a recent conference in the Korean parliament. "Such a conception results in the offenders being punished only lightly.

That attitude complicates the global effort to protect children from sexual abuse. Child pornography is often distributed from countries where there is a lack of oversight and strict legal framework for arresting and prosecuting perpetrators.

In East Asia, laws on child pornography and child sexual abuse are looser in the West and elsewhere in the world. In Japan, the production and distribution of child pornography is not illegal until 1999; possession of child pornography is only prohibited in 2014.

The Criminal Code of Japan stipulates a 3-7-year prison sentence for these crimes, but criminals are often given suspended sentences or relatively low penalties, according to a 2015 United Nations report.

Meanwhile, in the United States, people who own child pornography can face a prison sentence of 10-20 years. For every 5 people convicted, three will be sentenced to 5 years or more.

Officials from the United States, Britain, Germany and South Korea in October investigated and arrested 338 suspects in more than 30 countries on charges of sharing child porn videos through Welcome to Video, a darknet website. Illegal online space is not accessible from search engines). About two-thirds of the suspects are Korean. Many people are only fined a few thousand dollars.

Son was found guilty of owning, distributing and posting child pornography on a site containing up to 8 terabytes of such data, making it the world's largest child porn site.

Son's 18-month sentence for Son is not unusual. Among South Koreans found guilty of child sexual abuse, including possession of pornography, only one-third go to jail. 6% of teenage sex buyers are imprisoned.

Law enforcement officials do not consider child sexual abuse a particularly serious problem, said Park Chan-mi, a representative of the Korea Cyber Sexual Violence Center.

"A South Korean government investigator once told the suspect that all men were watching porn and that the suspect was arrested," Park said.

Congressman Kang Chang-il of the ruling party in South Korea drafted a bill to increase the maximum sentence for child pornography from one to three years in prison. Another legislator proposed restricting the activities of those convicted of harassing children.

But even when those measures are implemented, they are still too light for the West. Legal experts say it is difficult to significantly increase jail time with a single law revision.

"We want to make the changes stronger and faster," Ha said, "but the legal constraints prevent us from significantly increasing our penalties overnight."