Canada needed a new law before secret watching became a crime
In 1950 Canada's Supreme Court ruled that judges could not turn secret watching into a crime by calling it a breach of the peace; only Parliament could. It took until November 2005, after a scandal over hidden campus photos in Victoria, for lawmakers to act. English common law had the same blind spot.
The word voyeur is French for watcher, from voir, to see, and the English nickname Peeping Tom comes from the Lady Godiva legend. In 19th-century Paris the term had a narrow commercial meaning: clients who paid well to look through holes in brothels, a practice described as early as 1857. It gained notoriety in the 1880s and medical-forensic attention in the early 1890s. Today the word has loosened again, and people apply it to reality television and any media that lets audiences peer into private lives.
Psychiatry treats it as a disorder only in specific cases. The American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV counts voyeuristic urges as a paraphilia when someone acts on them or when they cause marked distress, and it excludes ordinary arousal from glimpsing nudity by accident. Research has been sparse: a review in 1976 could find only 15 sources. A national Swedish study found that 7.7 percent of people, 16 percent of men and 4 percent of women, had done it at some point, and estimated it happens up to 150 times more often than police reports suggest.
Because common law never made watching a crime, legislatures had to. The Canadian test case, Frey v. Fedoruk, began in 1947. In February 2005 a website posted covert photos of young women, many of them University of Victoria students, taken in places such as libraries; police and administrators could do nothing, because the pictures were shot in public and the site had no link to the university.
Parliament responded that November by adding section 162 to the Criminal Code, making it a sexual offence where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. In R v Jarvis the Supreme Court later held that privacy comes in degrees, so pupils in a school building still keep enough of it to be protected. The United Kingdom had already created a criminal offence on 1 May 2004.
Source: Voyeurism
