Every article I’ve seen about this has had a “what about kilts?” joke in the lead-in, comments, etc. It’s just an obvious line that writes itself.
People doubting that the UK needed a law about this must not have been paying attention when the exact same issue happened in the United States – guy caught taking upskirt photos on mass transit and it getting thrown out because the judge found no actual law prohibiting it. A law was passed but the original guy caught doing it walked free.
Speaking of kilts, my wife has attended Outlander conventions and said that the number of women who think it’s okay to try to lift a guy’s kilt or stick their hand under it, etc (all in “good fun”, of course) is extremely disheartening.
I trust you, as a man of integrity, plan to apply this same standard to yourself in all future SDMB threads, right? And we won’t see any future contribution by you to any thread unless you have a fucking law degree in the jurisdiction in question?
My expertise is the simple ability to click a link and read an article contained within a generally reputable site, the BBC.
I imagine you have that expertise too even if you cared not to exercise it.
Maybe the BBC is “fake news”?
Could be that they are even simply mistaken, but again, dang. This seems to me like a random anonymous poster stating something in contradiction of the facts as laid out by the BBC, apparently without even being arsed to read the frickin’ link.
Not to worry though. No need for you and me to “talk”!
Not really. Both stemmed from cases where someone was caught taking upskirt photos and the usual laws one would think would prohibit it (voyeurism/Peeping Tom) actually did not apply due a technicality, thus the impetus to pass laws explicitly prohibiting the activity. In fact, it was largely the same technicality in both cases; there was no presumption of privacy since you were in public and fully clothed therefore the person photographing you was not committing voyeurism.
The police didn’t do a damn thing because the law wasn’t clear enough. This has been fixed.
Your use of the term ‘virtue signaling’ is nonsense. This term is used to indicate that the target only talks the talk, but doesn’t actually DO something about the problem. This is not the case here.
Also, the phrase itself has been repurposed to mean “something has been done to address a problem that I don’t think is important”. I hope you’re not in that camp.
The politicians got involved, not to direct the public prosecutor to prosecute the case, but just to indicate to their constituents that that they, like all good people, were outraged. Which they did but bringing in new and totally unnecessary legislation. That’s virtue signalling.
There is a long standing and ongoing effort to replace common-law offenses with legislated offenses. And here are reasons for periodically re-writing existing legislative offenses. Even the idea of moving this particular offense into the sexual crimes act, which will have the effect of bringing in all the other side effects of being convicted under the sexual crimes act, is not without merit.
But the reported reaction of the police – that they couldn’t convict for taking a photograph unless there was evidence of an actual photograph – didn’t indicate anything other than police ignorance or disinterest, and isn’t solved by creating more categories of offenses for them to learn about.
So, if we start seeing prosecutions under this law, and the total number of prosecutions for upskirting increases, will you come back to the thread and admit how very wrong you are?
You seem really irritated that ambiguity is removed from the law, and I’m not seeing the problem with that.
I don’t understand what they said in the article about the sound of the shutter tipping off someone. He had a digital camera and recorded to memory cards.
Yeah, some cameras make a fake shutter sound by default (to alert the user that it just took a picture) but I don’t know why you’d have that feature in the “spy pinhole” style of camera. Maybe there was a mechanical switch he activated with his foot that clicked and that’s what the other guy noticed?
This happened to me, at a Christmas party where I wore my kilt. Drunk co-worker slid her hand up my leg and about an inch under the hem, before she removed it.