According to Thursday’s New York Times , a woman who was upskirt-photographed in a NY subway station (and was able to capture her assailant’s identity on her camera!) has successfully filed criminal charges against him:
Mr. Olivieri was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on Wednesday on misdemeanor charges of unlawful surveillance, attempted sexual abuse and harassment, a criminal complaint said.
That he was arraigned is surely excellent news, since in many other jurisdictions, women bodies are public property, with no expectation of personal privacy in public. Even more, it was the taking of photos that brought the criminal charges, not their distributing . In some conversations on this blog around this pet peeve issue of mine, some have suggested that posting the images should be wrong, but that the taking of them in public is and ought to be completely legal.
This NY case indicates that the “wrong” done is in the violation of the photographing; “unauthorized surveillance” seems to indicate that a woman’s body, regardless of its location, is always a zone of privacy. And to that I say an emphatic “yes”!
More past posts on bodily privacy
(cross posted to Don't ya wish your girlfriend was smart like me? )
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: It appears that women may actually have a right to their bodies in NY.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/9398
It's about freaking time! I was aghast at the rulings that said women don't have an expectation of privacy when out in public. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that I put on clothes to cover parts of my body explicitly states that I DO have an expectation of privacy for those parts of my body.