The Manhattan district attorney recently issued several warnings to female subway passengers about the beginning of Upskirt Season. Five arrests were made in a single week in March, and many more arrests are expected during the summer months.
If riding a crowded underground train is not part of your daily routine, you may not have heard of this.
To "upskirt" is to slip a camera under a woman's skirt and grab a picture or short film of her underpants. This is more easily accomplished in the summer months, when women wear lighter and fewer clothes. As do men, for that matter.
Guys trying to look up women's skirts is not a new thing. But the practice really took off with the ready availability of small cameras, chiefly cellphone cameras. Every year the police report more complaints and more arrests. In New York, convictions can lead to prison sentences of up to four years, at least theoretically.
Upskirting happens everywhere, but creepy men with low self-control are particularly attracted to subways. For one thing, many of the cars are crowded and surreptitious actions are less likely to attract attention.
(Crowding also creates a nice environment for groping women, a perennial subway complaint. Less crowded cars seem to appeal more to flashers and masturbators.)
In addition, the passage from an underground train to street level involves climbing stairs or riding an escalator, and snatch voyeurs can follow behind and just below women, close to the hems of their dresses and, well, you get the picture.
Women are rightly offended by this behavior.
One Case
Last August, a quick-minded young woman, "Amy," contacted police after such an incident. She even provided a stick-figure drawing of what happened. In it, Amy is the standing blue figure and the upskirter, drawn in red, is reaching past another seated passenger to slip a camera under her skirt.
Initially, Amy thought the man was trying to touch her leg, she told a news reporter:
"It was between East Broadway and Delancey that I noticed his camera phone
facing up my skirt. Once I noticed it my mind blanked and all I remembered was
grabbing his phone and screaming 'What the fuck are you doing' and we wrestled
maybe 5-10 feet down the moving train while it pulled into the station.
"He was yelling in Spanish and broken English stuff like 'I didn't do anything!'
'What're you doing?'"—Amy added that she's Mexican and understood him—
"and I yelled back that he was filming up my skirt, I called him a pervert, I told
him if he wasn't doing anything to just let me look at his phone and all the while
no one around me stepped in... I think because the guy was feigning ignorance
and everyone was really confused."
When the train stopped at Delancey, she says the man "ripped the phone out of
my hands and got off" the train. Delancey happened to be Amy's stop too. She
noticed that he turned right, as if "he was just trying to get away from me
because it seemed like he didn't know the station very well because there's no
exit to the right on this platform." So she waited for him.
"He came out a few seconds after me and that's when I started taking the photos.
He was yelling at me about how he was going to report me to the police... [maybe]
as a way to manipulate me and make me feel like 'Oh maybe he wasn't filming
up my skirt."
Amy took four cellphone pictures of the man and gave them to the police, who only started to look for the man after a second woman filed a similar complaint about him; this is apparently the standard law enforcement response. No reports of an arrest.
Amy sounds like a spirited gal. She can take satisfaction from the way she handled her situation, but she also took risks that could have turned out badly for her.
Context
--- The upskirt phenomenon was so prominent by 2012 that a small New York gallery hosted an art exhibit by that name. It did not appear to be a prurient thing -- a costume designer and a textile designer assembled several women's clothing displays in which white-gloved attendants lifted up the skirts to reveal unexpected fabric creations. Maybe the transgressive title and its news value inspired the artists. Maybe it was funny, but it sounds a little weird.
--- The police are busy. New York recorded only 333 homicides in 2014, a record low in modern times, but the trend switched upward in 2015. The number of rapes reported also increased in 2015. Making cases against upskirters is time-consuming, partly because incriminating evidence is in the hands of offenders who have an incentive to get rid of it, and partly because many witnesses do not have the time or inclination to participate in a drawn-out process of investigation and prosecution. Also, the police may find it difficult to justify diverting energy in a violent city to catch low-rent creeps.
--- The judicial system is not always helpful. In 2014, the top court in Massachusetts overturned a Boston upskirter's conviction because state law only criminalized voyeurism involving naked or partly naked persons. Police had caught the man in a sting operation after multiple complaints about him.
--- In fact, when men are caught and prosecuted for upskirting, their cameras often reveal multiple incidents. In a 2013 case, a New York urologist was convicted for using a "spy pen" camera that was found to contain pictures of 11 different women's private parts; more images were located later, presumably in his home. The doctor took a no-jail plea deal with no sex-offender status in exchange for getting therapy. He also was fired by his prominent hospital, and most likely will have a hard time getting work in his field.
My Story
Some people like narratives, and so I will share my own experience for those who care to read it.
When I was 17, I had a part-time job at the main branch of the Portland library, a broadening experience that introduced me to interesting new books and, perhaps more, to a range of eccentric individuals.
A number of downtown street people, mostly older men, would spend all day in the library, often sleeping at the tables with their heads leaning on their folded arms. Some of them smelled pretty bad, but nobody bothered them. Libraries are the original safe spaces.
Crazy people visited frequently. I particularly remember a man who was very interested in cacti. Several times a week, he would visit the stacks desk and submit requests for certain cactus titles that had disappeared from the collection long before. Always the same titles, never there. The cactus man would throw little fits every time he requested the same books and nobody could find them.
Another regular at the stacks desk was a well-dressed older woman who signed each request form with many names, always including "Queen Elizabeth" in the group.
Colleagues told me that a particular restroom on the first floor was a regular cruising location for gay men seeking sex.
One day when I was reading shelves (straightening for Dewey-accurate order) in the Literature and History room, I squatted to check titles and numbers on the lower shelves. After a few minutes, I realized that a man in the next row over also was squatting and was staring at my crotch. He caught my eye in a moment of distraction and leered at me.
I got up and found my surpervisor, a large and surprisingly agile woman who chased the voyeur down the stairs and out of the building. Nothing more happened.
I was a little shook up for a few minutes, but I had worked several months at the library by then. I knew these things could happen. I also knew that the librarians and supervisors would back me up in any serious situation.
Then I got over myself and went back to work.
What to Do
I don't think the legal system is equipped to deal with upskirters. The jails are overcrowded with violent felons, and there isn't room to lock up all the cowardly creeps who prowl the streets.
Maybe we could send the upskirters to group therapy, but that would be expensive and my guess is that those guys would meet up after sessions and share pictures with each other.
Activists say women suffer traumas after upskirting events, and it is easy to understand distress in such a circumstance. On the other hand, there are activists advocating for all kinds of victims these days. The allure of victimhood seems to be irresistible to many people. It would be difficult to sort which victims have suffered most, and it is certainly not a project that I am prepared to undertake.
My preferred reaction is rage. My experience wasn't traumatizing, but it did make me angry. If I had been a few years older and a little more confident, I like to think I would have told the voyeur off in a loud voice instead of notifying my supervisor.
One little-discussed way to promote civil behavior is this: Public shaming. People get embarrassed when confronted with their own bad actions. It traumatizes THEM. It is surprisingly effective.
My advice is this: If you see some jerk taking pictures under a woman's skirt, create a scene. Speak loudly (do not yell) in a controlled voice that lets everybody in the vicinity know what you have observed. People will come to stare, and some will voice their own scorn. Get out your cellphone and take the guy's picture. Post it on the internet, and pin a copy to the closest bulletin board or tape it to a nearby wall. Share it with the police.
When weaselly people have a legitimate fear of being called out publicly, they tend to behave better.
