By Erika Icon

YNOT EUROPE – Although pornography is illegal in South Korea, officials are having a tough time keeping internet porn out of the hands of the masses. That may be because the country ranks as one of the world’s most tech-savvy countries. More than 90 percent of South Koreans have high-speed internet access, and more than half of the 50 million population owns at least one smartphone.

Enter the South Korean porn cops. Since the government can’t control the population’s attempts to get a porn fix, officials created a force called Nuri Cops (a.k.a. Net Cops). The squad of more than 800 volunteers — university students, information technology workers, professors and housewives — patrols the internet for porn sites and offenders. Members report facing criticism from spouses and friends as well as harassment from online porn enthusiasts who refer Nuri Cops as “the enemy of South Korean men.” One Nuri Cop said he received 5,000 vengeful messages after writing an online post about his work.

Over a two-week period in August, the squad reported more than 8,200 sites and individuals. Police shut down 37 websites; another 134 sites remain under investigation for porn-related charges. Typically, even when webmasters delete adult content from their sites, it generally reappears a few days later.

Nuri Cop Moon Tae-Hwa, a devout Christian and family counselor, spends hours on his computer tracking online porn fans, even though he admits the fight is futile.

“It’s easy to find smut on the internet, but it’s difficult for me to watch,” Moon said. “It’s disgusting, and it bothers me because the images I see linger in my head for so long.

“I feel like I’m cleaning up dirty things,” he added. “It’s like shoveling snow in a blizzard.”

The government blocks foreign porn websites and shuts down sites operating within South Korea. When even that doesn’t work, officials use information provided by Nuri Cops to clamp down on stubborn citizens. Over a period of six months ending in late October, authorities arrested 6,400 people accused of producing, selling and posting porn online. Distributing, selling or displaying “obscene materials” on the web can net a violator up to one year in prison.

Free speech proponents disagree with the government’s efforts to eliminate adult content.

“It’s a reign of terror against sex,” said Ma Kwang Soo, a Korean literature professor at Seoul’s Yonsei University and the author of Happy Sara, a book banned in his own country due to sexual content. “No country in the world has ever reported that banning porn results in a drop in sex crimes.”

Sex crimes have been on the rise in South Korea for the past decade. Researchers at the Korean Institute of Criminology — which, coincidentally, is run by the government — attribute the upswing in statistics to an increase in victims’ willingness to report abuse and assault. According to the institute’s research, more than 18,000 suspected rapists were arrested in 2010, an increase of 7,000 over numbers from the year 2000.