Skirting Around the Issue: Misdirection and Linguistic Avoidance in Parliamentary Discourses on Upskirting

Image-Based Sexual Abuse

Until a decade ago, academic scholarship relied on legal definitions such as non-consensual sexual imagery to describe practices such as upskirting. Since 2010, Powell and Henry have written on how unauthorized images are disseminated as a consequence of information and communication technologies. Technology-facilitated sexual violence refers to the use of mobile and online technologies as tools to “blackmail, control, coerce, harass, humiliate, objectify or violate another person” (Powell & Henry, 2017, p. 398) and is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women. This includes “revenge pornography,” upskirt images, and creepshots, among other iterations. Powell and Henry (2017) developed this framework in response to the inadequacy of both the terminology used to describe these actions and the laws used to criminalize them, which frequently treat “existing and new technologies merely as ‘tools’ of abuse and as such elide the unique ways in which victim survivors experience harms” (Powell & Henry, 2017, p. 398). Moreover, because behaviors such as “revenge porn” have often been framed in public discourse in misleading and problematic ways, their concept of technology-facilitated sexual violence provided an opportunity to instead focus on similarities among diverse behaviors and responses. This enabled the problematic language surrounding the framing of such behavior to be avoided (Powell & Henry, 2017). Above all, they frame technology-facilitated sexual violence as a gendered phenomenon that disproportionately affects women for three reasons (Powell & Henry, 2017): First, like other forms of violence, women and girls are the main targets of digitized violence; second, the impacts of such behavior are gendered because of outdated sexual norms for women; finally, such behavior perpetuates what Connell (1987) dubs gender hierarchization—the “historically constructed patterns of power relations between men and women.” (pp. 98-99)

In addition to being understood as a form of technology-facilitated sexual violence (Powell & Henry, 2017), upskirting might more precisely be conceptualized vis-à-vis McGlynn, Rackley, and Houghton’s (2017) concept of image-based sexual abuse (see also Henry, Flynn, & Powell, 2018). McGlynn and Rackley (2017) problematize the language used to describe “revenge porn,” which they argued referred to “a relatively small, albeit pernicious, subset of private sexual images [that] . . . concentrates on the motives of perpetrators, rather on the harms to victim-survivors.” Like other forms of non-consensual image-based harm that have become media-friendly monikers, such terms minimize the harm associated with the activity, a trend that I observe is similarly apparent with the practice of creepshots (Thompson & Wood, 2018). Notably, these terms disconnect such actions from the wider phenomenon of men’s abuse of women. It further distracts from the elements common to the non-consensual creation and/or distribution of sexual images: the sexual harassment and abuse of women (McGlynn & Rackley, 2017). McGlynn and Rackley (2017) describe image-based sexual abuse as a term to better understand “the range of ways in which sexual images are created and/or distributed without the consent of the individual depicted” (pp. 536-537). Importantly, the use of the phrase “sexual abuse” is deliberately employed to convey the significant harm that may occur, while simultaneously identifying it as a form of sexual violence. Above all, the breadth and flexibility of the term “image-based sexual abuse” enables new and future forms of image-based sexual abuse to be captured within this framework, which is important given the pace at which technology is advancing.

Like Powell and Henry (2017) who draw upon Liz Kelly’s (1988) influential work on the continuum of violence, McGlynn, Rackley, and Houghton (2017) also base their framework on this model. This continuum can be understood in two ways: First, it can be understood as a continuous series of elements or events that blur into one another and cannot be easily distinguished. Second, this continuum of violence identifies common factors ⁹ linking what ostensibly might appear as distinct phenomena—the “abuse, intimidation, coercion, intrusion, threat and force” used to control women and which underpins much of men’s abuse of women (Kelly, 1988, p. 76). All image-based sexual abuse scholars ¹⁰ seek to make connections between such abuse and other forms of sexual violence, enabling a more cohesive, holistic response to the phenomena. Whereas this foundational work on image-based sexual abuse has primarily focussed on ‘revenge pornography,’ I instead focus explicitly on upskirting. I subsequently situate upskirting as a form of image-based sexual abuse perpetrated by men against women to illustrate the continuities with other forms of violence.

Linguistic Avoidance and Patriarchal Resistance

Analyzing a range of different situations from court discourse to political discourse, Caffi and Janney (1994) identified linguistic avoidance strategies that were similar across speech situations. Janney (1999) defined linguistic avoidance as

complex, systematic, pragmatic, skill involving choices in different linguistic systems (pronoun, determiner, person, aspect, modality, number, tense, voice, degree, negation etc) that modify meanings at different levels of linguistic organization (word, phrase, clause, sentence, discourse). (p. 260)

Just like physical strategies of avoiding threatening objects (e.g., moving away from things), there are also speech patterns for avoiding threatening concepts in discourse. ¹¹ These generally appear in two ways—“talking away” and “talking around” a negative concept without implicating oneself, or the position one represents. This act of avoidance can be achieved through hedging, which involves the ways a sentence is framed, the emphasis on certain elements within the sentence, and its order. This might also occur through involvement and non-involvement speech—the latter of which refers to the shifting of responsibility for a threating object or idea to another person or thing (Tannen, 1989). Building on this work, Janney (1994) developed five dimensions to linguistic avoidance (valence, proximity, specificity, evidentiality, and degree), to which Anchimbe (2008) (drawing also on Humphrys’ (2004) thinking) later added a further two categories (urgency and imaginary).

Although Janney (1999) and Anchimbe’s (2008) dimensions of linguistic avoidance are useful for general political discourse analysis, they do not explicitly account for gendered speech that avoids, trivializes, neglects, or otherwise diminishes men’s abuse of women. To better classify such forms of linguistic avoidance, I add an additional category to the existing research on avoidance speech, misdirection, which refers to communicative strategies that draw attention away from the true causes or nature of an issue through acts of derailment.

In particular, this theory of misdirection is indebted to the work of scholars such as Lamb (1991) and Romito (2008), who have written on how the dominant group, which is generally White, heterosexual males, influence the development of language and actively construct it so that it supports their perception of reality (Lamb, 1991). This in turn supports and maintains the hierarchical status of the group. Criminologists such as Scully and Marolla (1984), among others, have documented the various ways in which language is used to maintain the hierarchical status of violent men. This neutralizing of the many kinds of men’s abuse of women ranges from techniques of neutralization (Sykes & Matza, 1957) ¹² to judges’ comments and lawyer’s interrogation of woman victims in the court room, to the construction of women in media coverage of crime (Moore, 2014). Similarly, in this article, I specifically discuss the use of language to deny and hide men’s abuse of women during the second reading of the Upskirting Bill. In the case of upskirting, misdirection arose out of the symbolic violence of language (Bourdieu, 1991), which misdirected speakers’ attention away from the structural causes of image-based sexual abuse.

I also argue that misdirection illustrates a specific form of patriarchal resistance (Berns, 2001). Patriarchal resistance includes (a) the normalization of men’s abuse of women, (b) the diversion of attention from men’s responsibility and the cultural and structural forces that foster violence, and (c) the distortion of women’s violence (Berns, 2001). Importantly, Berns (2001) describes how those guilty of executing patriarchal resistance can simultaneously condemn the abuse of women while excusing it through advancing counterfeminist movements. This is achieved through degendering an issue and camouflaging the cultural factors that contribute to the perpetuation and perpetration of men’s abuse of women. There are many ways of achieving this, including the silencing of women’s abuse by men through namelessness, fragmentation, veiling, lying, encoding, omission, false-naming, secrets, taboo subjects, erasure, and non-naming (Rich, 1978). This form of patriarchal resistance is present in the second reading through acts of misdirection and through the fragmentation of the issue, false-naming, and non-naming. This serves to protect everyday men from accountability for the objectification of women at the heart of upskirting and other forms of image-based sexual abuse.

Romito (2008) reflects on two strategies that are employed in framing men’s abuse of women: legitimation and denial. Legitimizing male violence refers to instances where male violence is visible and defined as acceptable behavior. Such examples include marital rape and intimate partner homicide excused under the provocation defense. When legitimizing men’s abuse of women becomes socially unacceptable however, other methods are employed to hide the reality of such abuse. Linguistic avoidance is one kind of denial and describes a set of practices that minimize responsibility for actions through various linguistic devices. This ranges from presenting acts without agents (e.g., through using nominalization or the passive voice), to presenting victims without agents, to obfuscating gender and diffusing responsibility (Lamb, 1991). As a technique, it can be deliberate or unconscious and results in making men “disappear from discourses and texts on male violence” (Romito, 2008, p. 45).

Forms of denial include attributing another meaning to something that has happened (e.g., something has happened but it is not violence); selective perception allowing part of a problem to be ignored (and only isolated incidents to be seen); denying responsibility (these are individual issues and not collective issues of concern); psychologizing (a depoliticizing tactic that portrays men’s abuse of women as something committed by mentally unwell individuals); euphemizing (using language to deliberately be imprecise and misleading to obscure the seriousness of an act); and compartmentalization (giving different names to forms of violence to disrupt the continuity of seeing actions as perpetrated by the same category of people). Although there are many different forms of denial, as illustrated above, Romito (2008) asserts that “the most direct form consists of not seeing the violence and its consequences” (p. 95). In my discussion below, I analyze how MPs failed to frame upskirting as a form of image-based sexual abuse and generated counterfeminist narratives through the use of misdirection and other techniques of avoidance.

The Invasion of (Wo)Men’s Privacy

In the second reading of the Summary Offences Amendment (Upskirting) Bill 2007, attention on privacy prevailed. Upskirting is, of course, an invasion of privacy. To photograph a women’s intimate areas without their consent and upload these recordings to social media platforms and other websites violates and degrades women victims and (re)produces harmful gendered regimes of visibility. ¹³ Moreover, given that privacy invasion is a crucial part of the harm of upskirting, it would be remiss to suggest that a preoccupation with privacy is misplaced. As I quickly uncovered during this stage of my analysis, however, discussions only focussed on upskirting as an invasion of privacy, and not also as a sexual harm. It is this selective perception in the framing of upskirting that is problematic. As the title of the Bill illustrated, upskirting is a gendered behavior that involves men taking non-consensual sexual images of unsuspecting women as they move through public spaces. During the second reading, there were only nine references to the violation of women’s privacy, compared with 14 referencing the invasion of both men’s and women’s privacy, despite there being no recorded instances of men having their genital and/or anal region photographed without their consent. ¹⁴

Most members present either discussed the victimization of women only fleetingly and in passing, or not at all, preferring to discuss the right to privacy for men and women and the need to protect “people” in general from upskirting. Three speakers also voiced their concern over the potential for Scotsmen to be violated. One speaker, Janice Munt of Mordialloc, reflected on the implications of upskirting for their friend David, beseeching their fellow MPs to also consider “David’s right of privacy . . . to wear his kilt without offensive acts being perpetrated on him” (Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2598). This demonstrates the degendering of the conversation (focussed on a behavior in which women are almost solely victimized by men), with numerous speakers discussing the effects of upskirting on (Scottish) men. Other speakers deliberately focussed on men as victims of upskirting in addition to women stating,

We need to ensure that women’s and men’s dignity and privacy are protected, and we need to give police the powers to penalise offenders. (Jeanette Powell [LNP], Member for Shepparton, in Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2596)

To me polite words do not have a place in describing actions like that, because you should call a spade a spade. Ethnic cleansing means genocide, and here upskirting means invading women’s or men’s privacy. (George Seitz [ALP], Member for Keilor, in Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2611)

I am very pleased that the government has taken the opportunity to bring such a Bill into the house, not only to protect women, as we have all said, but also, I suspect, men. (Judith Graley [ALP], Member for Narre Warren, Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2606)

Above, members explicitly reference the invasion of both men’s and women’s privacy, degendering the discussion and disconnecting upskirting from a broader history of violence against women. Despite the gendered nature of upskirting and the repeated instances of women victims continuously being targeted by men (Hunt, 2007), speakers time and again reference both men’s and women’s privacy being invaded. The second example is interesting given the assertion by Seitz that “you should call a spade a spade,” followed by the claim that “upskirting means the invasion of women’s or men’s privacy.” The syntax is noteworthy; the clichéd statement of calling “a spade a spade” followed by the claim of what upskirting is implies that Seitz’s statement reflects the inherent nature of upskirting, that is, the invasion of women’s and men’s privacy. There are two issues with presenting things in this order, however.

First, this implies that upskirting is, above all, an invasion of privacy. This illustrates Powell’s (2010) work on the false distinction between privacy invasions and sexual harm (on which I elaborate below). Second, the claim suggests that both men and women were equally likely to be victimized. There is no qualifying statement to clarify that women are overwhelmingly victimized by upskirting, and at the hands of men. Furthermore, the reference to genocide and ethnic cleansing, an incredibly extreme comparison and overt act of derailment, also suggests that the terminology of upskirting is a euphemism for privacy invasion. Steitz’s comments are markedly different to the comment made by MP Judith Graley who observes that women’s privacy needs to be protected “as we have all said,” but men’s must also be protected. The syntax positions men’s privacy as a secondary concern to that of women’s privacy. The prefix of women’s privacy, a concern that “all” members have raised, indicates that women’s privacy is the focus and that men’s privacy is a secondary concern only. This is interesting given that there were 14 references to men’s privacy compared with only nine references to women’s privacy, demonstrating a disproportionate concern about men’s victimization.

Acknowledging upskirting as an invasion of privacy that disproportionally affects women is limited to only a few speeches during the second reading. There is a further distancing by the speakers away from the systemic structural issues which encourage and produce gendered harms in the community through the use of avoidance speech which reframed the issue as one disconnected from gender. This illustrates what Anchimbe (2008, p. 158) described as “management speak,” where politicians in potentially threatening situations employ highly ideological language using connotative vocabulary items to stir the listener intellectually or emotionally. Management speak is a form of avoidance speech that modifies the meaning at different levels of linguistic organization—word, phrase, clause, sentence, discourse (Anchimbe, 2008). In the case of upskirting, it is frequently described using highly connotative vocabulary items such as a “disgusting,” “reprehensible,” and “dirty” (Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2601). Given that management speak is often achieved by presenting an issue in such a way that it negates blame for a problem and simultaneously saves face for the speaker by talking around or away from a confronting issue, it is less apparent in the case of upskirting where speakers unanimously admonish the act of upskirting. Management speak is employed to focus on upskirting as an invasion of privacy (to both men and women) which serves to misdirect attention away from the gendered nature of the behavior and the structural conditions within society responsible for enabling misogynistic views about women to abound. ¹⁵ This is particularly interesting given that one speaker in the example above, Mr. Seitz, insists on calling “a spade a spade.” In their silence on the gendered nature of upskirting, however, the speakers did not “call a spade a spade.”

Instead, their speeches illustrate how attention is misdirected away from the issue of gendered harm to concentrate instead on male victimization. When men are framed as victims of upskirting, this form of linguistic avoidance functions to put distance between the issue of upskirting and the person or people who may be blamed for that issue, in this instance the elected representatives of parliament. I suggest that misdirection is used here as a form of denial through the non-naming of upskirting as a form of gendered harm and in the members’ silence on male accountability. This selective perception allows part of the problem to be ignored, demonstrating how patriarchal resistance can be subtly enacted and how counterfeminist narratives can be advanced.

Diffusing Responsibility to the Digital

In some instances during the second reading, technology was wholly blamed, not only as the means to facilitate upskirting but as the actual cause of the behavior itself. The rationale underpinning many speakers’ speeches suggested that “this behaviour is new and wouldn’t be happening if not for the rise of technology.” This reflects a similar trope that has been well explored in the criminalization and criminology literature, usually relating to youth crime, whereby appeals to the past are made by older generations about the problems with the state of affairs today (Pearson, 1984). Upskirting was causally linked with technology to such an extent that it was suggested that, if the technology could be controlled, then upskirting would cease.

This expression of misdirection sees the diffusion of responsibility away from men and placed instead on advancing technology. This technique of avoidance works to remove the agent from the act of upskirting by conflating the technology used to extend human action as the responsible agent for perpetrating upskirting also. This frames technology as both the means, cause and agent responsible for perpetrating this form of image-based sexual abuse. The culprit often identified for invading the privacy of men and women was technological advancements such as micro-cameras and smartphones, rather than the men using such technology. The issue that many members felt was most important was not the objectification of women by men, but the spread of criminogenic technologies in everyday life (Wood, 2017). The perceived riskiness such technology signified to members during the second reading is evidenced by their emphasis on technology as the cause of key harms in contemporary society as demonstrated in several claims by speakers:

It is a great shame in my opinion that this legislation is necessary at all, but it has become very necessary; I guess it is a reflection of the 21st century and the era we live in. There is no doubt that society has a different view of the world to even 20 years ago, let alone 50 or 100 years ago. These are changed moral and technological environments. (Mr. David Morris [LNP], Member for Mornington, in Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2610)

The importance of this Bill is that it creates these specific new offences that have been made necessary because of advances in technology in recent times . . . Because of the ability for people to carry concealed cameras and the like, these sorts of acts of upskirting have become possible in recent times, and of course the law needs to adapt and evolve to take account of those sorts of developments. (Mr. Tony Lupton [ALP], Member for Prahran, in Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2609)

In this day and age [where] we have to change so many things, even our right to the expectation of privacy. Our innocence is being destroyed. (Ms. Christine Fyffe [LNP], Member for Evelyn, in Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2592)

In the first extract from Mr. Morris above, he reflects on the changed “moral and technological” environment that he perceives is qualitatively different to the world 20, 50, or 100 years ago. The syntax, diction, and connotation in this extract works to produce an emotive statement on what Mr. Morris perceives to be the sad state of the 21st century. In the first sentence, Mr. Morris opens with an assertion that it is “a great shame” that the Upskirting Bill is required, but that it is nonetheless “very necessary.” The use of the adverb “very” is used to qualify Mr. Morris’s assertion; it is then followed by a less certain statement which began “I guess it is a reflection of the 21st century.” This illustrates Janney’s (1999) fourth form of linguistic avoidance, “evidentiality,” where something appears less certain through the use of phrases such as “I think” or, in this instance, “I guess.” This also embodies the common trope of appeals to the past whereby older generations lament the current state of affairs, asserting that things were different when they were younger and that people or things in the present are problematic for this or that reason (Pearson, 1984). This is demonstrated by the following sentence in which he asserts that “society” views things differently now, a change he attributes in the final sentence to “changed moral and technological environments.”

Mr. Lupton’s comments explicitly erase men as the responsible agent for upskirting, instead shifting the blame to advancements in technology. In the third sentence, for example, Lupton uses the vague noun of “people” when talking of perpetrators carrying cameras around and, in the second half of the sentence, then states that “these sorts of acts of upskirting have become possible in recent times.” The connotation is twofold. First, “people” carry micro-cameras around; there is no identification of men as the group known to perpetrate upskirting. Second, it was suggested that upskirting is something that had only occurred because of new technology. Ms. Fyffe’s comment, the most emotive of the three extracts, similarly made an appeal to the past by reflecting on the need to, “in this day and age . . . change so many things.” Using the adverb of “even” before “our right to the expectation of privacy” suggests a sense of disbelief or shock—we must change so much already and now we must even change our expectation to privacy.

Again, we see how acts are presented without agents, obfuscating the gendered nature of upskirting by reducing it to an act which occurs because of a new technology (Romito, 2008). This demonstrated the issue identified by Moses (2007, 2013), who warned against compartmentalized analyses of technology to the detriment of broader sociopolitical contexts in which legal problems emerge. The issue of concern was the rapid expansion of the new techniques of everyday voyeurism and the inability of law to cope with these changes because of its inability to adequately predict the technological changes of the mid-2000s. Only one speaker, Nicholas Kotsiras of Bulleen, suggested education or awareness as a solution, and again the emphasis was on the appropriate use of new technologies rather than educating young boys and men that upskirting is a form of image-based sexual abuse that degrades and objectifies women. The only discussion on broader cultural representations of women focussed on slut-shaming and women’s bodies, with women held accountable for posing provocatively and looking like, as one MP stated, “trash.” ¹⁶

Another way in which technology was discussed was in positioning it as the cause of a new behavior, and subsequently the reason a new offense was needed. This often occurred in tandem with references to “new language” where, as Ms. Fyffe asserted, “Melburnians [woke] up to the fact that we had a new phenomenon that few had heard of before” (Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2592). Through compartmentalization, Fyffe’s statement severs continuities between upskirting and other, older forms of image-based sexual abuse. It demonstrates another form of misdirection that, again, draws attention away from the gendered nature of upskirting by focussing instead on technology’s colonization of everyday life. In framing upskirting as a novel phenomenon, such statements deny that upskirting is just another manifestation of everyday violence against women perpetrated by ordinary men. This reinforces the fact that the sense of crisis evoked by the upskirting “trend” observed by members has caused the creation of new language, and implicit in this is that upskirting too is a new phenomenon.

These statements worked to distance the speakers from the long history of objectification and image-based sexual abuse. It compartmentalized upskirting and separated it from other forms of gendered violence, rather than seeing it as existing on a continuum of harm (Kelly, 1988). Misdirection relocates the onus of the responsibility for upskirting onto technology, by framing emerging technology as the underlying cause of upskirting and encourages speakers to examine technology in a vacuum, away from sociostructural issues. This serves to depoliticize upskirting as an issue of men’s abuse of women, for the society imagined by speakers is not one assailed by misogyny, but rather technology.

“Sick Individuals” and the Exoneration of Ordinary Men

The reference to upskirting as something perpetrated not by everyday men but by pathologized individuals, such as “sick perverts” as one MP put it (Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2605), was one of the most significant acts of linguistic avoidance that my investigation identified. Below, I analyze how the community was represented as threatened by outsiders and examine how upskirting is framed as a “non-routine” intrusion perpetrated by the “sick” “techno-pervert” (Naughton, 2005). This separation of upskirters as “other” and as wrong, uncivilized, and abnormal was achieved in a number of ways and, importantly, this worked to again misdirect attention away from ordinary men, ensuring that they were not identified as perpetrators of upskirting.

One tactic employed was to frame upskirting as an abnormal and uncivilized behavior. Mr. Scott, for example, explicitly states that upskirting “in no way relates to a normal expression of sexuality” and that the behavior does not “belong in civilised society” (Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2601). This word choice both conjures norm infraction and emphasizes what a “civilized” society should entail. Using the word “normal,” he suggests that upskirting is committed only by those with abnormal sexual appetites. This extract reiterates the belief shared by several speakers that “normal” people do not commit upskirting.

This belief, however, was not universal among MPs. Several other speakers, all of whom were women, reflected on the perennial nature of looking up women’s dresses by “men” and the normalcy of this behavior. Furthermore, speakers such as Mr. Robinson talked about enjoying gyrations as much as other “punters”—reaffirming his place in the very heteronormative social order which encourages the objectification of women by men. Here we see a tension between affirming the normative order (or ideological discursive formation that encourages the culture of objectification celebrated by the speakers above) and the condemnation of “uncivilized,” “abnormal” people who engage in “perverted” practices. The use of the word “uncivilized” is powerful as it denoted a primitive or, in this instance, lascivious way of behaving. This “us” versus “them” dichotomy pushes the discussion of upskirting further away from the everydayness of image-based sexual abuse, instead positioning it as something extraordinary and unusual. Perpetrators were also framed as wrong-thinking through their juxtaposition to the “rest” of the community:

Most right-thinking people would think that the sort of behaviour that is needed to be legislated against would not occur in our community. (Mrs. Danielle Green [ALP], Member for Yan-Yean, in Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2595)

I’d like to delve into the reasoning and rationale of the disturbed mind that is behind this practice. (Mr. Tony Robinson [ALP], Member for Mitcham, in Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2588)

It is basically the criminal act of unlawful hooligans and mentally ill people who stoop to acts like that. (George Seitz [ALP], Member for Keilor, in Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2611)

In the above examples, upskirters are described as people with a “disturbed mind,” and upskirting as something “unlawful hooligans” commit, or an act that “mentally ill” people “stoop” to, which functions to diffuse the responsibility of upskirting from “normal” men (Kelly, 1988; Lamb, 1991; Lazar, 2010; Romito, 2008). This discursive formation of a community under siege from technology and “techno-perverts” is understood within the speech community of parliament as a discursive norm underpinning the shared beliefs of the institution. This “background knowledge” acted as a naturalized ideological representation which comes to be seen as common sense; the everyday here is threatened by the “techno-pervert” who is an “abnormal” or “sick” outsider (Fairclough, 1992, p. 31). This further serves to construct the perpetrator as an “other” from beyond the community, rather than as a product of a misogynistic culture which actively encourages the objectification of women. Ms. Danielle Green states that “most right-thinking people” would not condone this kind of behavior, implying that someone must be “wrong-thinking” to approve of or commit upskirting. The way in which the upskirt perpetrator is framed here creates a dichotomy between good and bad citizens, normal and abnormal people, and right- and wrong-thinking people. In all the examples above, the perpetrator is never identified as anything other than the “sick” other, distancing ordinary men from upskirting by pathologizing offenders. The metaphor of plague and contagion was also utilized in a similar vein to technology. The major difference was that, whereas the spread of technology primarily evoked fear and uncertainty, the emotive response to the upskirter was disgust. One speaker, Hong Lim of Clayton, described upskirting as a “crude, disgusting, perverted, deliberate and calculated act” (Victorian Parliament, 2007a, p. 2600). A complete non-sequitur made by one speaker that was particularly alarming was a reference made to gay men having sex in public. ¹⁷ Elsewhere, upskirting was framed as something undertaken only by those who were cognitively immature, approaching senility, or otherwise mentally abnormal.

This kind of misdirection is a common strategy. Within the context of gendered violence, there has been significant work on the representation of the rapist and the consequences of fixating that blame on the individual. Rape is rarely framed as anything other than “a matter of individual psychology” (Moore, 2014, p. 65), and as Soothill and Walby (1991) note, the typical sex offender is the “stranger pouncing out of a bush . . . the crazed or sick individual” (p. 1). Audiences are encouraged therefore to see rape as a problem caused by a few sick men and as something that has nothing to do with the gender hierarchy (Moore, 2014). This ultimately dampens critical debate and obfuscates the social causes of sexual violence and its relationship to power (Moore, 2014). As Moore (2014) notes, rape is a political device, an act of oppression that is wielded by members of a powerful group over people who are less powerful. Similarly, upskirting was presented as something that occurred sporadically, rather than as something that is structurally generated (Dowler, 2006).