‘Upskirting’: Man arrested for filming over 500 innocent women

Man nabbed by the Police in Madrid for filming more than five hundred women in public transport without their permission. He was filming under their skirt.

The man posted at least 283 videos on XXX websites, where they are being viewed by millions of times. Some of the 555 victims now identified are minors.

Last summer his videos first appeared online. The 53-year-old offender filmed daily near train stations and supermarkets. Sometimes he introduced himself to women to get closer to them.

During a house search, a laptop and three external hard drives were found with hundreds of videos on it. The perpetrator himself had a website with more than 3500 subscribers.

The so-called ‘upskirting’, filming under women’s clothing, has been punishable in the UK since February of this year. In Spain, the behavior falls under sexual abuse. In South Korea, it happens so much that 20,000 people took to the streets last year to protest.

In the US, the crime, popularly known as upskirting, downblouse or video voyeurism, has been prohibited in by U.S. statute since 2004 when Congress enacted the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act of 2004:

“Whoever, in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, has the intent to capture an image of a private area of an individual without their consent, and knowingly does so under circumstances in which the individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

But since then courts have been debating exactly what constitutes upskirting and private area — often tossing out convictions if a woman was in a public place and wearing underwear, saying the recordings fell under freedom of speech.