The National Police Agency has reported that the number of youths who fell victim to sex and other crimes after accessing Web dating (deai-kei) sites has drastically decreased in the first half of this year. This is welcome news, but since minors are still being lured into child prostitution and other criminal sexual activities through other Web sites, there remains plenty of reason for concern.

During the January-June period, police unmasked 777 cases of crime that took place after people accessed Web dating sites, a decrease of 14.3 percent from the same period last year. Child prostitution and child pornography constituted the largest group among exposed crimes — 319 in number for a drop of 20.4 percent. Of those who fell victim to crimes through Web dating sites, 84.8 percent or 356 were children who were younger than 18. This number represented a 41.4 percent drop. Of these children, 350 or 98.3 percent used mobile phones to access the Web sites.

Filtering services that block access to harmful Web sites on mobile phones and personal computers used by youths may have contributed to the lower number of crime victims. But other data show a somewhat different story. The NPA found that, during the July-September 2007 period, 124 children younger than 18 became victims of child prostitution, child pornography and other crimes by accessing Web sites that were not dating sites, compared with 206 children of the same age group who became victims in 241 cases of crime after accessing Web dating sites.