Upskirting has been a specific crime since 2019. A site with 400 videos of it is still being reviewed.

The story

Gina Martin, who campaigned to make upskirting a specific criminal offence after she was upskirted at a concert in Hyde Park in 2017, has said she feels disgusted after Metro uncovered a website showing around 400 videos of women and girls being followed and filmed without consent at Westfield, on tube stations and at bus stops. Most of the victims are unaware they are being filmed. Upskirting carries a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison and places serious offenders on the sex offenders register. Ofcom said it is actively reviewing the site under the Online Safety Act, having passed Metro's evidence to its online safety team, and that it is investigating a number of sites' compliance with their duties. The Metropolitan Police, unlike Ofcom, has not confirmed whether it is investigating the site itself, though it encouraged victims to come forward. Since the Act came into force eighteen months ago, £6million worth of fines have been issued against ten adult sites. Martin said: "I still live with the impacts of being upskirted today. There's this feeling of a loss of control, because that video of me is still out there and there's nothing I can do about it."

The reframe, with the manuscript

Upskirting has not been a legal grey area since 2019. It is a specifically named offence, carrying a custodial sentence and registration as a sex offender, created precisely because the previous law was not built to catch this behaviour. The rule exists, in full, on paper. What does not exist, eighteen months into the Online Safety Act and with Metro having handed Ofcom direct evidence of around 400 videos, is a prosecution, or even a confirmed police investigation into the site itself.

The manuscript's account of what happens to rules that are not routinely activated describes this gap exactly:

A regulation may sit dormant for years; minor breaches overlooked, paperwork adjusted, informal approvals granted. Then a conflict arises. The same rule, unchanged on paper, is applied in full. What was previously tolerated becomes actionable. The rule did not change; its activation did.

Upskirting law has not sat dormant through ignorance of its existence. It has sat dormant while a specific website, name known, evidence supplied, continued operating with an accompanying Telegram channel of more than 1,600 subscribers. Ofcom's own statement, that it is "actively reviewing" the site, is a description of a process still under way rather than a rule being applied. The regulator has the evidence. What it has not yet produced is activation.

Martin's account of what this delay costs is not abstract. It is the precise cost the manuscript identifies when a rule's application depends on someone, somewhere, deciding the threshold has finally been crossed:

Justice depends on consistency, not severity.

Two years of prison and a place on the sex offenders register is not a mild penalty. It is a severe one, attached to an offence Parliament named specifically because upskirting kept slipping through gaps in older voyeurism law. Severity was never the missing ingredient. Consistency is, and consistency is exactly what a site with hundreds of videos, sitting live and searchable while a regulator reviews it, demonstrates the absence of.

What makes this particular case difficult to challenge from the outside is the same feature the manuscript identifies in threshold enforcement generally:

The system's opacity protects it from challenge precisely because it makes selectivity invisible at the point of application.

Nobody outside Ofcom's review process can say why this site, evidenced and reported, has not yet met whatever internal bar triggers formal enforcement rather than continued review. The £6million already levied against ten adult sites proves the mechanism works when it is used. It does not explain the interval between evidence being supplied and a rule being applied to the site that supplied it.

The manuscript is direct about what institutions gain from an arrangement structured this way:

Institutions benefit from this arrangement. They avoid the cost of constant enforcement while retaining the option of decisive intervention.

Ofcom retains the option to act decisively against this site at any point, and may yet do so. What it has not paid, in the eighteen months since the Act took effect, is the cost of constant enforcement, of treating a named, documented, ongoing breach of a specific criminal law as something requiring an urgent response rather than an active review. For Martin, and for the women whose videos remain online while that review continues, the distance between those two postures is not procedural. It is the distance between a law that protects them and a law that, for now, simply exists.