In 2019, a court convicted a man of sexual assault after he followed a woman off a bus and sprayed semen on her jacket. But last year, police recommended only property damage charges for a supervisor who left body hair and smeared foreign substances on a female subordinate's desk, computer and uniform. The Korean legal system routinely downgrades non-contact "bodily fluid attacks" to property damage because the law requires direct physical contact for sex crimes. However, efforts to close the loophole have gained momentum following a recent Supreme Court ruling declaring that lacing coffee with semen constitutes sexual assault. Legal experts agree the law must classify bodily fluid attacks as sex crimes. Heo Min-sook, a legislative research officer at the National Assembly Research Service, said Wednesday that treating the attacks as property damage reduces sexual objectification to simple vandalism and denies victims legal protections. "The act of smearing bodily fluids is aimed at the person who will use the object, not at damaging the object itself," Seung Jae-hyun, a senior research