Long article:
'I felt completely violated'
With hundreds of thousands of photographs taken up unsuspecting women's skirts being posted online, the practice of 'upskirting' is clearly on the rise.
Emine Saner reports
The Guardian, Wednesday 25 February 2009
One summer day in 2006, Lucy Parkinson, then 21 years old, was shopping in Ealing, west London, when she heard behind her an altercation between two men. "I was crossing the road, and got stuck with a pack of other people at a traffic island," she says. "I was wearing a long-sleeved blouse and a white knee-length skirt." One man ran off and the other told her he had "chased him away because he had seen him 'upskirting' me".
Upskirting is the term used to describe taking photographs, often on a mobile-phone camera, up an unsuspecting woman's skirt.
"I hadn't even noticed it happening," says Parkinson, "and that's the most unsettling part - in a city, you just don't notice physical proximity to strangers. It could have happened a dozen other times too, for all I know."
It is impossible to judge how many women have been victims of upskirting, though a quick internet search yields hundreds of sites with hundreds of thousands of images. And there may be millions more pictures on phones and laptops that have never been shared. They have been taken in the street, on escalators in shopping centres, on trains, at bus stops and in supermarkets, schools, offices and nightclubs.
Upskirt photography is also routinely used by paparazzi photographers. Usually taken as a woman steps out of a car, "crotch shots" are prized by newspapers such as the Daily Sport and countless gossip and porn websites. While it is often assumed that a handful of celebrities, such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, actively encourage upskirt shots, many famous women are deeply upset by the prospect. In a recent interview, the Harry Potter actor Emma Watson described how, on a night out to celebrate her 18th birthday, "I realised that overnight I'd become fair game." (The rules that govern photographs of people under 18 are stricter than those for adults.) "One photographer lay down on the floor to get a shot up my skirt ... The night it was legal for them to do it, they did it. I woke up the next day and felt completely violated by it all."
There are endless web forums where "amateur" upskirters can exchange tips on how to get the "best" pictures. One was posted by a man who had made a "cam-bag" - a holdall with a specially made pocket with a hole in it for a digital video camera lens. Another writes: "Never forget to shoot their faces before or after to know which girls the ass belongs to ... After the first 50 asses, they look very similar and you lose most of the fun. After upskirting them, either step back and wait for them to turn or step by them and shoot direckly [sic] sidewise." Another poster, who says he operates "mostly at theme parks and tourist hotspots, or really anywhere that draws a large crowd of spectators and cameras", walks around until he finds "an attractive young lady, preferably a teen for my tastes, and then I evaluate the situation." He will often sit down next to a young woman and surreptitiously film her while pretending to fumble for new camera batteries in his bag.
[...]
While the image of the "Peeping Tom" may seem quintessentially British, upskirting is not confined to the UK. In the US, where many of the images posted on the internet were taken, a recent incident led to a change in one state's law. In Oklahoma in 2007, charges against a 34-year-old man, who had been arrested for kneeling behind a 16-year-old girl in a shop, placing a camera under her skirt and taking a photograph, were dismissed after an appeals court concluded that "the person photographed was not in a place where she had a reasonable expectation of privacy". But in response to local outrage, the law was extended, making the photography of another person without their consent for "prurient, lewd or lascivious purposes" illegal.
In Japan, upskirting is so rife that all mobile phones sold now make a sound that cannot be turned off when a photograph is taken. And several Australian states have specific laws banning upskirt or down-blouse photography.
For women who have become aware of such pictures being taken of them, "it can be extremely distressing," says a spokesperson from Victim Support. "The sense of violation can be the same as with other forms of sexual assault. We would encourage anyone who has been a victim to contact us." Parkinson says of her experience, "I felt unsettled, targeted, and helpless; there was nothing that could be done about what had happened, and nothing I could do to prevent it from happening again."
The "defence" used by some upskirters is that since the majority of shots are taken without the woman's knowledge, and there is usually no way she can be identified to the wider public, there is no "victim". But Sasha Rakoff, director of Object, a group that campaigns against the objectification of women, says it is symptomatic of the perceived notion that women's bodies are public property. "You see upskirt shots on the front of the Sport newspaper and lads' mags, which consistently promote Peeping Toms by printing pictures of readers' girlfriends, and glamour models in "private" settings, such as the shower. Is it any wonder that men - equipped with the latest, cheap and readily-available 'mobile spyware' - then enact real-life voyeurism?
"Whatever barriers might exist to being a Peeping Tom have been comprehensively eroded by the male-orientated media, while men who already had no qualms over this form of sexual invasion are routinely vindicated in their belief that such behaviour is acceptable."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... upskirting