Covertly filming women on nights out to upload the videos to social media should be made illegal, the Liberal Democrats have said.
The party has put forward a private members’ bill calling on the government to update voyeurism legislation to prevent the content from being posted online for profit.
It said the bill would clamp down on what it calls “a covert filming epidemic” and wants the government to force social media platforms to remove such content and permanently ban repeat offenders.
It comes after a BBC investigation exposed dozens of accounts on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. The videos focused almost entirely on women, filmed without their knowledge and taken from low angles or behind, sometimes revealing intimate body parts.
The government said covert filming of women and girls was “vile” and vowed to stop people profiting from it.
The BBC investigation identified nearly 50 women who had been filmed without their knowledge.
This doesn’t appear to be a crackdown on filming in public places. It seems to be going after the people who distribute it and the platforms who host it.
I think the same concerns still apply, if you can’t post that video anywhere it doesn’t do much good for you to record it.
Posting online is not the only reason people shoot voyeur videos. Or even the main one.
No, but it is important if you’re trying to record video of police brutality and such which is where my concerns lie about how these laws could be twisted
I think this is where we’re really starting to see modern society break down. We’ve gotten to the point where we all live and coexist in a space but there’s nothing binding us together, as community, other than the law. Turns out that if we assume there will always be people who try twist and exploit the law to their own advantage then the law itself no longer works as a tool for building a free and just society.
In the past, we had other systems such as community norms and traditions which tended to be much more adept at dealing with rule-benders. Where did we go wrong?