Media representations of camera sexual voyeurism in Singapore: a medicalised, externalised and community problem

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Straits Times’ coverage of camera sexual voyeurism (CSV) incidents in Singapore from 2004–2017. Utilising critical discourse analysis, I argue that the threat CSV poses to Singaporean exceptionalism was cohered through three distinct media discourses. Internalisation, which focused attention on medical explanations that pathologised perpetrators. Externalisation, which attributed CSV to camera technology and pornography use. And community intervention, which focused on successful community policing responses to CSV. These discursive oscillations individualised, de-politicised and de-gendered CSV by constituting it as the reprehensible acts of a few behaviourally disordered individuals which could be addressed through medical treatment, lateral surveillance and responsibilisation. By examining media representations of CSV, this article explores whether extant myths and discourses surrounding sexual violence re-emerge in media coverage of technologically facilitated sexual violence (TFSV).

KEYWORDS:

• Upskirting
• image based abuse
• technologically facilitated sexual violence
• sexual violence
• sexual voyeurism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Laura Naegler and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This narrow term describes only one way camera technology is used to record without consent. I use the term “camera sexual voyeurism” (CSV).

2. A sexual harassment offence under which camera sexual voyeurism is captured.

3. However, recent changes to the Protection from Harassment Act (2019) have ensured stricter penalties for harassment perpetrated by people who commit harassment in the context of an intimate relationship (both dating and married) and included making breaches of Protection Orders arrestable offences where there is evidence of hurt, intimidation or continued harassment (Protection from Harassment Amendment Act 2019s.8B-C).

4. Including the man who owns the website SgSpyCam and sales people working at Sim Lim Square technology stores.

5. A non-profit organisation that has run “cyberwellness” training for 340 schools since 2001 (Touch Community Services 2019).

6. Sexual Assault.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Vitis

Laura Vitis is a Lecturer in the School of Justice at QUT. Her research focuses on how technology is used to facilitate sexual and domestic violence within the Global South. Her work also examines the regulation of and resistance to technologically-facilitated violence. In 2017, she co-edited Gender, Technology and Violence for Routledge. Dr Vitis recently published a report focused on Technology and Sexual Violence in Singapore in collaboration with Singapore’s Sexual Assault Care Centre. E-mail: [email protected]