The breadth and complexity of our looking behaviour, and the subset of sexualised looking behaviour, are mostly irrelevant to the public and not yet fully scrutinised by science, and that is true for the sexualised looking behaviour that is considered both deviant and illegal, voyeurism. Voyeurism is an umbrella term concerned with the individuals who, at the extreme, require visual opportunities in order to experience sexual satisfaction, and this causes them harm or distress, and may cause harm to others. Some examples of the specific forms of voyeurism are voyeuristic coprophilia (viewing others defecating or urinating) and scoptophilia (viewing others engaging in sexual intercourse) which now, when those being viewed engage in this knowingly, is referred to in the UK as “dogging”. Where someone persuades a partner to engage in sexual intercourse with a third party, whilst this third party doesn’t know that they are being observed, the behaviour is known as troilism (for a case example see Allen, 1969). At its most extreme, voyeurism causes distress and impairment to the voyeur, something recognised by the American Psychiatric Association (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), and to the victim(s), and at its most benign it might involve a woman coming home, finding her partner in the shower, and watching without drawing attention to her presence. Some authors have suggested that within the umbrella of voyeurism, it might be useful to think of three sub-categories (Kaplan & Krueger, 1997), namely (i) voyeurs whose sole sexual outlet is through voyeurism, (ii) voyeurs who prefer their voyeuristic behaviour but will engage in other forms of sexual behaviour, and (iii) people who only engage in voyeurism in response to some form of stress. It is likely that the psychology at the core of the different levels of voyeurism on these continua will differ and at many of these levels there will be no immediate or long-term distress to either party. However, in order to be able to manage and prevent the levels of voyeurism that do result in distress, it is important to understand voyeurism at that extreme level.
…ardent fishermen, undaunted by failure and always hoping that the next time their luck will be better. Just as the fisherman will wait patiently for hours, so will the peeper wait for a female to finish some interminable minor chores before going to bed and then, like as not, she may turn off the light before undressing. Again like the fisherman who keeps a list of areas where fishing is especially good, the peeper not infrequently has in mind a number of particularly likely places to which he returns. (pp. 359–360)
Along with this rather benign description, they suggest that voyeurs tend to be the youngest child in their family, have good relationships with their parents, tend not to live in all-female homes, and are ranked high in fear of sexually transmitted diseases, amongst other features.
Since these studies and remarks, there has been some further research (e.g. Hopkins, Green, Carnes, & Campling, 2016) but for those who work clinically with these individuals, there is still little to base their assessments and interventions on. There are two reasons why knowing more about voyeurism is important: to understand more about the offenders and to understand more about the impact on victims.
Understanding the Voyeur
Yalom (1960) describes a range of voyeur clients who possess, “an exaggerated desire to see, by stealth, a member of the opposite sex in some stage of undress, in the sexual act, or in the act of excretion, which is so intense that it surpasses in importance the normal sexual act” (p. 305). Whilst some individuals simply find their interest personally troubling, for others it leads to contact with the criminal justice system. Unfortunately, in the UK it is not possible to ascertain how many individuals are arrested for voyeurism. It is an offence covered by police reporting within the category “other sexual offences”, which includes everything other than rape. Although the UK Ministry of Justice overview of sexual offending in England and Wales does identify voyeuristic offences recorded by the police, they are grouped together with exposure. This is a strategy also repeated in various books that present information on voyeurism, such as the chapter by Hocken and Thorne (2012), where voyeurism and exhibitionism are grouped together. On the surface, this makes sense: one focuses on people who like to display themselves and the other on people who like to see other people. It is also perhaps telling that exhibitionists, by the nature of their offending, are more likely to be noticed and apprehended, so we know more about them, what they do, how many people do it, and how many people have had it done to them. Perhaps more subtly is the implication that these two forms of non-contact sexual offence are psychologically linked. A connection has been suggested. For example, some authors have suggested that both these behaviours, and other paraphilias, may be related as they can be expressions of obsessive–compulsive disorder. Abouesh and Clayton (1999) provide a description of an exhibitionist and a voyeur who were both treated with paroxetine and showed a decrease in their behaviour and compulsive thoughts. The fact that the same medication worked for both individuals certainly hints that there may be a link but care needs to be taken with the assumption that if one medication can treat two issues, they are necessarily related. For example, hydrocodone is used as a painkiller and as a cough suppressant.
From a psychological perspective, the official figures for voyeurism provide little scope to examine the basic demographic characteristics or the potential for increasing risk to contact offences. Some authors have sought to further our understanding by examining voyeurism through empirical studies. In studies recruiting volunteers, it is likely that only specific people volunteer to answer questions about their sexual behaviour and within that group perhaps only a subset will answer honestly (see Ahlers et al., 2011, for an example). To further complicate matters, over time and across cultures different definitions of voyeurism may be used, resulting in potential bias. For example, in their recent paper Joyal and Carpentier (2016) asked the following in order to measure the prevalence of voyeurism in a Swedish sample, “Have you ever been sexually aroused while watching a stranger, who was unaware of your presence, while they were nude, were undressing, or were having sexual relations?” Such a definition might not capture, for an individual responding, the specifics of UK law which includes a person using a lavatory (Sexual Offences Act, 2003, Section 68). Thus, any estimates of the prevalence of voyeurism may be inaccurate.
Despite these concerns, it is useful to consider the estimates that have been published in a variety of settings. Estimates from the general population suggest that voyeurism is an issue for young males, with Dawson, Bannerman and Lalumière (2016) reporting that 52% of their sample acknowledged an interest in voyeurism. In Sweden, lifetime prevalence rates for experience with voyeurism was 11.5% amongst men (Långström & Seto, 2006). More recently, Makanjuola, Adegunloye, and Adelekan (2008) found a prevalence rate of 22% for experience with paraphilic behaviours amongst 408 male and female high school teachers in Nigeria with voyeurism, the most prevalent at 10%. In Brazil, de Oliveira and Abdo (2010) found in their sample of 7022 people that 13% reported having engaged in voyeurism. In Germany, Ahlers et al. (2011) reported that 44% of a community sample of men acknowledged at least one lifetime paraphilic behaviour and the second highest was voyeurism at 18%. Considering clinical samples, Maletzky and McGovern (1991) report that in their sample of offenders treated in a sexual abuse clinic, 1.2% (60) had a primary diagnosis of voyeurism. For the sake of context, 57.3% (2865) had a primary diagnosis of heterosexual paedophilia, 15.4% (770) exhibitionism, and 0.4% (20) zoophilia. Marsh et al. (2010) estimated that 8% of a sample of 122 adult male psychiatric inpatients met the DSM-IV criteria for voyeurism. These studies suggest that voyeurism is a relatively frequent form of paraphilic behaviour. Given that Abel et al. (1987) report that their sample of 62 voyeurs claim to have engaged in 469 separate acts on average, the scale of the problem is large.
In the laboratory studies the self-rated likelihood of taking part in voyeurism is found to be higher. Examining a sample of college students (n = 159), 84% of men and 74% of women admitted they would engage in voyeurism if they would not get caught (Rye & Meaney, 2007). Of note is that there were no statistical differences between men and women when the voyeurism involved watching an attractive person undress; however, when it involved watching an attractive couple have sex, men were far more likely to engage in this than women. The extent to which either gender would take part in voyeurism did depend on how likely they were to be caught, and in this study the highest likelihood that was presented to the participants as a possibility was 25%, which might explain the higher rates compared to the population estimates. Perhaps in real voyeuristic situations people have a much higher expectation of being caught or have some understanding of the potential consequences, whether caught by the people being viewed or by the law. Or perhaps we are more likely to feel a sense of guilt if we are actually doing something as opposed to only imagining doing something (to an extent this has been examined by exploring differences between imagined guilt and recollected guilt—see Mclatchie, Giner-Sorolla, & Derbyshire, 2016). Some support for the idea that there are important concerns regarding comparisons of what people predict they would do and what people actually do is provided by a study by Templeman and Stinnett (1991) who found that in a sample of male college students 42% said that they had engaged in voyeurism. However, that the prevalence is so high is interesting and supports the view of Forsyth (1996) who offered the idea that it might be more useful to think of voyeurism, to some extent, as normal behaviour; given the opportunity to look, most people will look.
A missing element to these estimates is asking people why participants would take part in these behaviours. Our expectation might be that the explanation would be almost entirely sexual, that it would provide either immediate or later material to be used for masturbation or for some kind of fantasy. However, such explanations may be dependent on the individual’s maturational stage, sexual experience, and their views about their own body or that of their sexual partner, amongst others. A young boy or sexually inexperienced adult who has not seen a naked women may be motivated by curiosity rather than any sexual motivation, as might a young girl or sexually inexperienced woman, and a person with limited sexual experience may be motivated to watch a couple engage in sex to compare their own sexual behaviours with those of others. Is the motivation that lies behind the behaviour important? Perhaps a thought experiment is worth considering. People who frequent art galleries will have seen patrons who will sit for extended periods of time looking at a particular painting. Why do they do that? Perhaps they are an art student who is trying to understand the use of colour, brush techniques, or someone who is emotionally moved by the grandeur and complexity of a particular work. That being the case, we would be unlikely to begrudge them taking up a seat or standing in front of a painting. What if they found the painting sexually stimulating (which might be termed iconophilia ), either at the time and were surreptitiously pleasuring themselves or were using their memory of the picture for fantasy purposes when they returned to work or home? For a case where art was found to be sexually arousing, see Case 3 in Leiblum and Nathan (2001). The purpose of this experiment is to consider what is it about voyeurism that makes it deviant, is it the looking, is it the invasion of privacy, is it our concern that we have been seen doing something embarrassing, or is it based on our assumptions about what people use that visual information for? This may help us understand the earlier issue regarding the differences in gender. If men and women engage in voyeurism to the same extent, but men are more likely to get caught and then men are more likely to be labelled as being voyeurs, and are more likely condemned for it, is this because we suspect that men are far more likely to have deviant motivations than women or that deviant motivations in men are more deviant, or that the expression of the same deviant motivations, for example masturbation, is considered more sexually deviant or dangerous when performed by men than when performed by women? This would be a useful area to carry out research.
Voyeurism and Other Risks
It is unclear the extent to which voyeurism may be a preparatory phase for other offences, such as sexual assault, or a component of other offences, such as stalking or theft. So, the level of risk implied by voyeurism is unknown, despite studies suggesting that there may be a link (Freund, Scher, Racansky, Campbell, & Heasman, 1986). Hirschfield (1948) reported that voyeurs would frequently watch couples in Paris and then would steal from them, but it is not clear if the voyeurism was simply observation prior to the theft or if the theft was an opportunistic consequence of the voyeurism. Other case studies suggest that voyeurism and sexual offences involving children may be linked but again it is unclear if the two can be separated (see Hammer, 1968). Longo and Groth (1983) found that in their sample of 128 child molesters, 20% were found at interview and from their medico-legal histories to have engaged in voyeurism as children. In their sample of 103 rapists, 24% were found to have been childhood voyeurs. As interesting as these findings are, one must be cautious when thinking about the classification here: do the children meet the definition of voyeur or were they opportunists who happened to be caught watching their neighbours get undressed or having sex, and even if not opportunists, what was the motivation that drove their behaviour?
Abel and colleagues (1987) found that in their sample of 1170 participants who identified as having a paraphilia, 62 identified as voyeurs and of these only 1.5% could be classified as pure voyeurs, that is, with no other paraphilias. For this group, the average number of paraphilias was approximately five, which included behaviours such as rape (23 of the voyeurs), exhibitionism (n = 39), and female non-incestuous paedophilia (n = 32). Does this tell us anything about the development of voyeurism or what it might lead to? There could be a relationship, but is it causal or a developmental stage that is passed through on the way to the eventual form of offending, based on some underlying sexual issue, such as preoccupation or lack of control? This idea is known as the Courtship Disorder Hypothesis (Freund, 1990), which suggests that the patterns of escalation within normal dating relationships, such as finding a potential partner, interacting with that partner prior to physical contact, establishing physical contact, and sexual intercourse, are mirrored in the behaviour of sexual offenders; voyeurism, exhibitionism, frotteurism, and rape (McNally & Fremouw, 2014). We don’t know if voyeurism is a stage just as we do not know if sexual assault is a stage that will eventually lead to rape, although research is beginning to examine the pathways of different kinds of offenders, whether they de-escalate, remain stable, or escalate (Wynn & Duff, 2016). However, it is an important area to explore as earlier authors have identified escalation in voyeurs (de River, 1956; Yalom, 1960), and Yalom (1960) suggests that there are behaviours that may be indicative of voyeurs who will escalate, namely the entering of a building to view a victim (it is not clear if this is the same building that the victim is in or that it is the level of risk and planning implied by entering any building) and drawing the attention of their victims to themselves whilst watching. Also, psychoanalytic theorists have suggested that sadism may be a factor in voyeurism as it can be degrading for the victims (for example, in the case of coprophilia ; Rosen, 1967) and that in the case of female voyeurs underlying motivations include rage and sadism (Slovenko, 1965).
Understanding the Victim
“Voyeurism affects women in the same ways all forms of violence, harassment and sexism affect women,” Westendorf said. “Women are denied ownership and agency of their own bodies.” (The Toronto Observer, 14 October 2012)
The little that we do know of impact suggests that it has lasting consequences for victims, and thus, understanding voyeurism in order to reduce recidivism has important implications for social health.
Available data do suggest that some people do know that they are victims of voyeurism and are concerned enough to report it. The National Crime Statistics of 2010 suggest that between April 2016 and March 2017, there were 8973 offences of voyeurism or exhibitionism reported to the police, a 10% increase from the same period 2015 to 2016.
One important contradiction to this view that voyeurism is harmful is that of Doyle (2009) who argues that undetected voyeurism is not wrong. He refers to “perfect voyeurism” where a person is viewed or listened to, and yet this is never discovered and is never shared. In this situation, Doyle still believes that it is not wrong regardless of whether the victim(s) would prefer not to be watched or heard. One can certainly see the appeal of the argument; if you are being watched when you next bathe, but do not know at the time and never find out, what harm has befallen you? You have enjoyed a pleasurable bath and your voyeur perhaps has pleasured himself, so everyone is happy and no one is harmed. My concern with this line of argument is what happens (potentially) if we use it in other areas of offending? If a child is too young to understand or report having been sexually abused and there is no physical or emotional harm done, is this “perfect child abuse” doing no harm and as such is not a bad thing? If an adult is unable to communicate through disability, such as Intellectual Disability, that they have been groomed and consequently take part in sexual activity with a member of their care team, and no physical or emotional harm is done, is this behaviour that is technically not of concern? If X happens and no one knows that X has happened, except the person who did it, should we care and what does it mean if we do care (we still, presumably, don’t know that it happened)? This is something of a tangent, but does raise some interesting issues about behaviour, and perhaps is particularly pertinent when thinking of voyeurism, where it is entirely possible that much of it goes on without anyone knowing, save the perpetrator, and he/she doesn’t mind because that’s what he/she wants. Given the high numbers of self-reporting participants who state that they would be voyeurs if they would not be caught, and the relatively low numbers of reports of voyeurism perhaps we have to accept that there is likely a great deal of perfect voyeurism that is going on, but to what extent does this possibility impact on our lives? Perhaps very little, until you read the preceding paragraph.
Public Views of Voyeurs
As with many areas that are related to unusual or undesired behaviour, the public do have a view of voyeurism; however, there are few research studies that have explored this area (see below). This is an important area because the public, either currently are or in the future may be, victims or perpetrators of voyeurism. If the public view of victims is that they are ignored, that if there is a prosecution they cease to become victims but become witnesses to be harshly treated under cross-examination in court, if the voyeur is convicted they get a short sentence and no intervention so they become more risky, will future victims come forward? If the public view of voyeurism is that it does no harm, one is unlikely to get caught, if caught seldom prosecuted, there is little to prevent people slipping into voyeuristic behaviours. Also, if the public do not understand what voyeurism is, they are unlikely to recognise it in themselves and perhaps attempt to prevent it or to seek intervention before it becomes troublesome. We know from research in stalking and sexual offending that public views are seldom the same as legal or psychological views with regard to what counts as troublesome, risky, or warning behaviours (Challinor, 2015; Duff & Scott, 2013), so there is good reason to suspect the same will be true of voyeurism. Where do these views come from? There are a number of likely candidates, though the extent to which they are interrelated or may lead from one to the other is not known.
I use full sized cameras. Better image quality and most people pay you no attention when you have one…If you look like you know what you are doing, most people will ignore you. DSLR. By far my favorite camera for creepshots. Why? Because you DO NOT HIDE IT. You can’t really, it’s too big…The way my SLR hangs on me leaves it at the perfect “aim at the hiney height”. I just need walk near a sexy booty, press the trigger and bam, I have a 5 shot per second burst of insanely high quality shots of said booty…Down side: Shutter noise on my current system. Newer cameras give the option to turn this noise off for truly silent photography. So, in the mean time, sneaky shots need to be taken around places with lots of masking background noise. Streets, festivals, etc. (from https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/113rvn/a_warning_to_the_women_of_toronto/)
For the vulnerable or the curious, these kinds of instructions may both provide the technical know-how and the sense that other people are doing it too, which has been identified as a technique that people use to transfer responsibility of their own actions onto a larger group of people (Coleman, 1987). There may also be an element of their being a “cachet” to being a successful voyeur, one is being “sneaky” and “clandestine” and in that way bettering other people. And after all, as the above example suggests, it’s just a picture of “a sexy booty”.
As with many other areas of human behaviour, popular film has depicted various aspects of voyeurism. The Susan Wilson Story captures an account of the true story of Susan Wilson who was subjected to video voyeurism (a similar idea is presented in Alone with Her and as part of Sliver) and a variety of films focus on men spying on women using telescopes and binoculars (Body Double, Disturbia, Rear Window); an interesting example of this, which is based on the religious diktat not to commit adultery, is the film Decalogue 6 where a young man spies on a woman but when the opportunity arises to have sex with her he refuses. She seduces him and he then attempts suicide. One Hour Photo presents a man who satisfies his voyeurism through making double-copies of a family’s photographs, one set to keep for himself, and American Beauty has a variety of voyeuristic elements that bring characters to unfortunate ends. The film Peeping Tom is not, as one might expect, so much about voyeurism as we are thinking about it here but rather it is about a man who wants to capture the looks on people’s faces when they know they are going to die, when he is killing them. What these films have broadly in common is that voyeurism is presented as obsessional, linked to some kind of mental health issue, and ultimately results in tragedy either for the voyeur or the victim, and often bystanders are caught in the crossfire. From the examples I am aware of voyeurism is presented as an exclusively heterosexual behaviour, where females are victims (although there are films where female voyeurism is not covert, such as Magic Mike and where female voyeurism is not the central feature of the film, such as Elle, or the British Film Red Road where the female voyeur is employed to watch CCTV as a security guard). This final factor is perhaps the most interesting, from the perspective of how the public develop their views; potentially only men are seen as “real” voyeurs and either women don’t do it or if they do, then it is something other than voyeurism. It is then hard to separate out other gendered biases, particularly related to sexuality and sexual offending, from one’s view of voyeurism, i.e. that men are perpetrators, their motives are sexually deviant, and women are victims. Added to this is the concern of risk (although the extent to which people believe that they have been a victim of voyeurism has not been explored) whereby women will only think that they are at risk from men. Although the statistics bear out that this is most likely, we know that there are female voyeurs.
As a final example of the potential for media bias, there is song. Two examples will be provided, Watching You by The Outfield (“Did you save your last dance for me? Watching you, Watching you, Know how much I want it, Just watching you”) and The Police’s Every Breath You Take (“Every breath you take, Every move you make, Every bond you break, Every step you take, I’ll be watching you”); in both cases, the watching of someone is romanticised and presented as evidence of longing and love. This is not to suggest that these are not intended as love songs (although they may not be), and that paying attention to what someone does, wanting to dance with them, isn’t romantic. However, it is also plausible that in so doing, for some people, the sensitivity to another’s behaviour when it is of this kind may be affected so that people are more tolerant than may be ideal and some people may learn behaviours in this way, assuming that they are considered by society to be romantic and harmless. We may be more likely to initially interpret our own and others’ behaviour as positive. Of course care has to be taken not to pathologise everything that could be interpreted as promoting unpleasant or harmful behaviour and see every song and every film as warping the minds of the youth or the vulnerable. We could, however, find out if our views of voyeurism are impacted upon by the media and identify ways to prevent it if it is a problem.
Furnham has undertaken a range of studies asking the public what they believe are the most important factors in the development and cure of a range of problematic conditions (e.g. Furnham 1989; Furnham & McDermott, 1994). The motivation for these studies is Furnham’s view (1988) that there are similarities between the explicit theories of academia and the implicit theories held by laypeople and as such lay theories may provide some useful insights in understanding phenomena. A secondary consequence of this view is that lay theories may underpin the thoughts and behaviours of those who are labelled as delinquent or alcoholic and may be important in understanding the extent to which an individual may feel their thoughts and actions are within or without their control. Furnham has taken this same approach with paraphilias, and within that has explored public views concerning voyeurism (Furnham & Haraldsen, 1998). In this study, the findings indicated that for voyeurism, as with the other paraphilias under consideration (fetishism, paedophilia, and sexual sadism), the factors identified as most important for its development were fearing the opposite sex, having been a victim of child abuse, experiencing strict parenting, and possessing repressed sexual feelings. The results also indicated that the factors which differentiate voyeurism from the other three paraphilias are early relationships (abuse and early sexual experiences), repressed emotions (including lack of empathy in childhood), and biology (physiological factors). The fact that the general public have a view and that the factors they identify could be classified as external and societal as opposed to internal and biological for the development of voyeurism is interesting and worthy of a degree of speculation. It might suggest that we generally believe that voyeurs are made and not born (which is interesting given that there is evidence that much of our visual preference is present very early on (Morton & Johnson, 1991; Pascalis, de Schonen, Morton, Deruelle, & Fabre-Grenet, 1995). For the sample in the study that may have identified as voyeurs, it allows them to blame others and for those who don’t want to identify their behaviour as voyeuristic they can blame external factors that they know they have not experienced. This is a cynical view of the findings but presumably there is an explanation for any of these particular explanatory descriptions that are offered by laypeople, just as there are when we examine laypersons’ theories of physics (McCloskey & Kohl, 1983). So care needs to be taken when we take the views of others entirely at face value, without considering there may be some complex thinking that lies behind the expression of our own and others’ views.
As mentioned earlier, the public, we, are voyeurs and the public, we, are victims of voyeurism, and understanding this lay-stance on voyeurism may be useful for thinking about prevalence, risk, and, from the perspective of the voyeurs, treatability; if they think nothing can be done, they might not seek help or engage with it if it is Court-mandated (see Walton and Duff [2017] for the views of sex offenders who struggle to believe that they can change). Unless otherwise demonstrated, a good starting point for understanding someone and their behaviour is that they are a person, like us.
So having considered the views of the public, how has psychology tried to understand voyeurism to date?