The man placed his mobile phone in his shopping basket so that the screen was facing down. He looked like any other shopper browsing the aisles of the Wroxham supermarket in the hot summer of July 2017 – nothing about his appearance was unusual or strange. Taking a closer look at an item on the shelves, he placed his wire basket (empty of everything but his phone) on the ground next to then 19-year-old Robyn Smith.

“My mum was immediately suspicious,” Smith says now. Smith’s mother – who had brought her family on a two-week summer holiday to the quaint Norfolk town from their home in Aberdeen – looked down. She realised the man’s phone was recording up her daughter’s skirt.

Like 85 per cent of young women in the UK, Robyn Smith is a victim of sexual harassment in a public place – in this instance, “upskirting”. Upskirting is when someone takes a nonconsensual photograph or video up someone else’s skirt; it gained prominence in the press earlier this year after a victim, Gina Martin, campaigned to criminalise the act.

GQ and YouGov’s State Of Man poll has found that 15 per cent of men aged 25-34 do not consider upskirting in the workplace to be sexual harassment

“To me the idea that someone should be protected from people taking nonconsensual photos of their genitals isn’t up for discussion,” says Martin – and yet in many countries, it still is. While upskirting is criminal in Canada, under the voyeurism section of its criminal code, and Belgium implemented laws against sexual harassment in 2014, many states in the US have not outlawed the act. In 2016, a Georgia court ruled that a man could not be convicted of invasion of privacy for upskirting a woman in a supermarket because it was not a “private place”.

In Japan – where voyeur photographs are so common that you can’t turn the shutter sound off your smartphone, to alert potential victims when taking a photo – police have cracked down on covert upskirting “shoe cameras”. After a petition, Martin created gained 100,000 signatures and the UK government is now backing a private member’s bill that will make upskirting an offence punishable by up to two years in prison.

Yet while the justice system might finally recognise that upskirting is an abhorrent act, many of the public still fail to do so. GQ and YouGov’s State Of Man poll has found that 15 per cent of men aged 25-34 do not consider upskirting in the workplace to be sexual harassment. Ten per cent of men of all ages would not consider it harassment to upskirt a female colleague at work.

“That makes me so angry,” says 27-year-old Martin. In July 2017, she was upskirted at a festival and describes the experience as “total humiliation”. “For me, knowing that someone had their hands between my legs taking pictures of my crotch without me knowing is a horrible feeling,” she says. “So humiliating, so intrusive, it makes you shiver.”

“When the largest democracy in the world elects a man to lead them who has, on record, boasted about his own sexual offences, is it any wonder that men in positions of power over women feel they can behave with impunity and take what they want?” says Dr Helen Gavin, a forensic psychologist who has previously lectured on the psychology of sexual deviance.

Gavin says that extreme voyeurism is a “paraphilia” – a condition characterised by abnormal sexual desires. “Voyeurism is the displacement of sexual desire onto watching rather than doing,” she explains. “It is, oddly, treated in the same way as OCD, with a mixture of antidepressant (usually Prozac) and other medication, alongside psychotherapy.” Although related to a voyeuristic urge, Gavin explains that cases of upskirting can be different. Citing a 2018 paper, she notes the offence is often financial as well as sexual, with culprits selling images for profit.

On Reddit there are still forums that promote upskirt pictures. Our survey found over half of 16-24 year olds use the site. © Valerio Pellegrini

These pictures aren’t hard to find online. On Reddit, a post on an upskirt forum by a user named “Portuguese Pervert” is entitled “Co-worker upskirt”. It features four zoomed-in shots of a woman sitting on an office chair, seemingly taken from underneath a communal table.

“The men who dismiss [upskirting] in this survey may also be dismissing other forms sexual harassment too,” Gavin says. “Its less intrusive or prolonged aspects allow the public to minimise and trivialise it and its effect on the victim.”

For victims, upskirting is clearly distressing. Smith – whose mother didn’t immediately tell her she’d been upskirted, but instead hurried her out of the supermarket in the hopes of not ruining her holiday – says the experience made her feel “violated and humiliated”.

“Knowing that this man took a video of me is far worse than a photo. As he was moving his phone, did he catch my face? Where did this video go? How many people are able to connect my face to the video?” she says.

“I feel incredibly helpless. And the more I think about it, the angrier and more humiliated I become.”

In the past, Smith has also witnessed her friend be upskirted on the Paris Metro and she expresses shock that such a “grave violation of privacy” is not yet a criminal offence in the UK. She tells the men who don’t think upskirting is sexual harassment that they need to “completely re-evaluate their outlook”.

“It’s despicable. It’s disgusting,” she says. “Imagine if your wife, mother or daughter came home to tell you that a stranger had upskirted them. Would you be calm and collected or would you be enraged that someone had violated their privacy in such a way?” In June, Conservative MP Christopher Chope blocked the progress of the upskirting bill, which could’ve been passed with an instant verbal vote if no objection was raised. He was the sole objector.

“I tried very hard to make him see sense. I even breached parliamentary protocol by going over to his bench and trying to convince him before the reading,” says Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP who first presented the Voyeurism (Offences) Bill, which seeks to criminalise upskirting. “He wouldn’t listen to me or anyone.”

A new government bill on upskirting, replacing Hobhouse's initiative, has just had its second reading in the House of Lords, meaning there are now three final stages before it can become law.

Chope claims he blocked the bill because there wasn’t sufficient time for it to be debated and Hobhouse dismisses the MP as a “dinosaur”. Martin – who currently speaks in schools and is writing a book for children – says we need to focus attention on education.

“I think we have to put a lot of our time and education on the younger generation... You look at Chope and you think, 'I can’t school Chope. We have to start with younger kids.' It’s critical,” she says.

Yet online, little is being done to curb upskirt pictures being shared at alarming rates. In 2012, Reddit banned the subreddit r/creepshots, a forum that was used to share voyeuristic, sexualised photographs of nonconsenting women in public places. Despite this, various subreddits dedicated to upskirt photographs still exist on the site. While the largest, with 171,000 subscribers, r/upskirt, is full of posed pornographic photos and rules that “shots of unaware women will be removed”, many smaller subs seemingly allow voyeuristic photographs.

“I remove clearly nonconsensual pictures. And if you see any, please feel free to report them,” says the moderator of r/upskirtpics, a subreddit with 9,000 subscribers. Despite this claim, many of the most popular posts on r/upskirtpics appear to be of unsuspecting women. The most popular picture ever posted to the subreddit is of a woman bending down while trying on shoes in a store. More recently, there is a picture of two women on a dancefloor, one of a woman on the beach and multiple of women shopping on the street.

“It’s hard for me to tell if things are staged or not,” says the moderator. “I doubt I see every piece of content submitted.” He removed the picture from the dancefloor when sent a link.

© Valerio Pellegrini

One anonymous Redditor who uploads pictures to r/upskirtpics says he enjoys thinking about whether a woman knows that a picture has been taken. “I like watching nice pictures,” he says in broken English over Reddit’s messaging service. “I [like] thinking who, when and why do this picture. And [if] this woman know that someone do this picture.”

For attitudes to change, much more needs to be done to raise awareness of the impact that upskirting has on its victims. Forty-nine-year-old Sue Mackie was also upskirted in a supermarket. Eight years ago she was in Marks & Spencer “moseying around the make-up section” when a man snuck up behind her.

“When I turned [around], I saw a man slightly bent down and his mobile phone was clearly taking a picture up my skirt,” she says now. “I panicked. I immediately went into fight or flight mode. Instead of seeking help in the store I just wanted to get to my car, lock the door and feel safe driving away. I was shaking, felt sick.” Mackie says the harassment left her feeling “hugely violated, frightened, anxious” and “fearful”.

Neither Smith, Martin, Hobhouse or Mackie were shocked by the results of GQ’s State Of Man poll – like many women, Martin is so frequently harassed in public that she even recalls thinking “not again” when the man upskirted her at the festival. The reaction to her campaign also demonstrated the callous attitude many people take towards victims.

“I got rape threats for almost a year,” she says. “People said I deserved to be raped and ‘It’s your own fault that you’re wearing a skirt.’ I became like a meme, like people were posting pictures of vaginas and tagging me in them. That was the hardest part, dealing with the online abuse.”

“We still have further to go as a society,” Hobhouse says. “No one has the right to do this to another person and no one has the right to be sexually intimidating.”

Reacting to GQ’s State Of Man poll, Smith says, “I think any man who believes it is acceptable really ought to think long and hard about it.” Mackie goes further. “Is this the world you want your daughters to grow up in? Would you be proud to be friends with a man that behaves like this?” she asks.

“If it’s not sexual harassment then what would you call it? A laugh, a cheap thrill, a bit of fun?”

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