Tired of ignoring it
In intervals between jumping off cliffs, Parliament has passed legislation making “upskirting” a crime. I don’t really understand why it can’t just be part of existing laws against doing creepy shit to women, but whatever. A young woman named Gina Martin started a campaign to this end after some toad stuck a camera up her skirt.
Speaking after the bill was approved, Gina said: “Eighteen months ago I was upskirted at a music festival and I decided I wasn’t going to brush it off.
“I was tired of ‘ignoring it’. I felt this was wrong and I was astounded to learn that upskirting wasn’t a sexual offence. I wanted to change this for everyone, because the least we deserve is to be able to wear what we want without non-consensual photos being taken of us.”
Gina was waiting to watch The Killers perform at British Summer Time music festival in London’s Hyde Park when a man put his phone between her legs and took pictures of her crotch.
This is the bit that interests me. Why would a man do that? With porn available with a click or two, what need is there to collect photos of women’s crotches? Surely none. It has to be about hostility rather than sex. It’s degrading, it’s shaming, it’s intrusive and insulting and intensely hostile. It’s dominance.
I do not have an answer to the latter question, but I am even more puzzled by the implied first one. There have been so many cases where something is done, and the reaction is “we need laws against that”, but I am just asking myself why that isn’t already covered under existing laws. Why isn’t online harassment covered under laws against harassment? Why isn’t upskirting covered under whatever laws there are against Peeping Toms? Why, for that matter, isn’t terrorism covered under laws against conspiracy to commit a crime and murder?
One could just apply the laws that already exist instead of going “I don’t understand that newfangled Twitter stuff” or “you shouldn’t have worn a skirt”.
Alex SL, I would ask myself the same thing, except some cases that have come to court have stated that it is not covered, so there (the last not to you, just channeling the judgment as it goes in my head). Why? I guess…boys will be boys? I sometimes suspect that “boys will be boys” is covered by common law to the extent that it is now considered legitimate policy and has legal standing.
Alex,
In some of your examples there are good reasons for the different crimes: they require different kinds of evidence, perhaps collected in different ways and they might carry different sentencing protocols. But that argument doesn’t hold in the slightest for upskirting, which is very clearly sexual assault as anyone can plainly see. I have no idea why it wasn’t covered by existing laws.
Oh, come on latsot, no idea at all? You know it’s about women, and not stifling males, right? ;-)
Well, no. I have no idea why this specific thing is not covered under other laws of sexual assault.
I can speculate, though. For a case to go to court, the police and the CPS have to agree that it’s worth pursuing; that there’s a reasonable likelihood of conviction. My speculation is that women who have gone to the police to report upskirting have been told that there’s no point in trying to get a conviction either by the police, the CPS or both. So in that sense, you’d be exactly right.
But if such a case had gone to court and a conviction secured, it would presumably become part of case law (I am not a lawyer as you can plainly see, I’ll ask Mrs latsot about it when she gets home) and there’d be no need for a new law specifically about upskirting, it would have become part of the legal definition of sexual assault.
So the corollary to my wild speculation is that the law might have been needed because without it such assaults had never been brought to trial or – if they were – there were no convictions.
I haven’t looked into this new law, though, and I might be barking up entirely the wrong tree. Perhaps the new law covers a bunch of other stuff too, reforming some former law, and upskirting is the only thing the media can get excited about.
On one level I know very well why it wasn’t part of prior law. On another, I have no idea why the new law was necessary.
So we’re both right! Yay!