The Kuna High School girls basketball team is in town for a game at Bishop, and the Bishop Kelly High School boys are ready. A group of teenage boys excitedly cluster around an office window with a propitiously discrete view of the girls locker room. Or so they thought. Shortly after the girls begin changing into their uniforms, some of them notice the blinds on the window glancing open. They quickly dress and call their coach. Parents of the girls immediately call the police, who promptly arrest the boys, confiscate and search 13 cell phones, and begin a detailed investigation. The boys face up to five years on misdemeanor or felony charges of Voyeurism.
Voyeurism is a relatively recent addition to the growing list of "Don'ts" here in America. Criminal voyeurism includes any "use of mechanical or digital equipment to watch or record people in any place where they can reasonably expect privacy, which includes any place in which they are expected to be in a state of nudity." Many States have added new voyeurism laws in recent years, and the Sexual Offences Act 2003 imposes Federal sanctions.
What began as a simple harmless act that most of our parents engaged in as teenagers almost landed the BK boys in jail. Luckily, no incriminating pictures were found on any of their cell phones and police had to let them go. The school is still considering whether punitive measures are in order, but the larger issue is whether society really needs to be so highly regulated.
Most Americans buy into the myth of Law and Order because we have been spoon-fed this line since childhood. However, as John Hasnas points out in, "The Myth of the Rule of Law," Order doesn't necessarily equate with Law. There can be Law without Order and Order without Law.
But at a more elementary level, what harm has really been done here? If the boys went and raped the girls there would be a serious problem. But all they did was look. According to Boise Police, the girls were not naked at the time of the incident. Is this a free country? Come on, boys will be boys. And besides, it doesn't hurt to be looked at. Where is the harm? Stop being such a baby. If I was a 14-year-old basketball player and my mother called the police on the kids from the school I was playing against because they looked at me in the locker room, I'd die of embarrassment!
A side point - there were a group of girls dressing together in the locker room. They complain that boys peeked in , yet they all were free to look at each other. Why is this not sex-based discrimination?
with information from
Patrick Orr, The Idaho Statesman, Boise
A 19 year old lifeguard was also charged with photographing a woman at the swimming pool where he worked.
