Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Indecent Exposure

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

It can happen on a bus, in a park, in your home, at the school gates. An estimated one in every ten women in England and Wales have reported it happening to them.So why do people flash? And when did it become criminalised?Indecent exposure is when someone deliberately exposes their genitals in order to frighten or upset someone else. It is difficult to prove, and has been prosecuted under a number of different laws during our history.In this episode, Kate speaks to Professor of Psychology Dr. Elizabeth Jeglic from John Jay College of Criminal Justice to find out why people commit indecent exposure. Then, she speaks to Professor Kim Stevenson from the University of Plymouth about how indecent exposure and other sexual offences have been policed in the UK.*WARNING there is discussion of sexual assault, rape and child abuse in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Sophie Gee.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code BETWIXTTHESHEETS for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription.To download, go to Android or Apple store.https://www.btp.police.uk/ro/report/rsa/alpha-v1/advice/rape-sexual-assault-and-other-sexual-offences/indecent-exposure-flashing-offending-public-decency/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. This is Kate Lister, and I am here with quite a serious warning about today's episode. Today, we are looking at the crime of indecent exposure or flashing to use the vernacular and the history of how this crime was policed. So inevitably, we are going to be talking about sexual assault, sexual harassment, and we do have a number of personal testimonies of people who have been the victims of this crime.

this is not an easy listen, but it's an important listen. But it's also one that you just might not want to listen to today, and that's absolutely fine. Today's episode came out of an experience that one of my producers, Sophie, had. So I was walking home by myself, and I was on a quiet street. It was just me for a while, and then I was aware of just one man behind me, and everything was just like, okay, I'll speed up and get to the end of the road. And when I did get to the end of the road, the man kind of went,

and he just had his willy out. I was mainly confused about what he wanted. Like, why was he doing that? It's estimated that around one in ten women have experienced indecent exposure since they turned 16. police have described the rise in cases of flashing as an epidemic. But not all cases are reported to the police and of the incidences that are reported, which is over 10,000 a year, only around 5% actually make it to court.

And if we're talking about 10% of the female population, it's almost certain that if this crime didn't happen to you, then someone you know and love has experienced it. So we asked a few of our nearest and dearest if they have ever been flashed at or experienced indecent exposure. And one thing that really surprised all of us is how common this is

and that the people that we love have certainly experienced it and that we'd never heard these stories before. It's just not something that we talk about. This is the section where we are going to play first-hand accounts of experiencing this particular sex crime. This could be a tough listen.

So when I was about, I must have been about 11. A repairman came around to fix the washing machine and yeah, basically I walked in, showed him where the washing machine was. He walked in behind me so he was kind of blocking the doorway for me to be able to get out. And he stood there with his overalls on and he just put his hand on his fly and I remember I think that's a bit inappropriate. And there's me kind of like looking at him, wanting him to look at the washing machine, but instead he was looking at me.

and then he undid his fly and just like took his penis out, which made me instinctually freak out massively. Even as a child, I just somehow knew that this was really bad. When I was at college, which was quite a long time ago now, there were a group of girls sat in one of the lounges of the horse residents, when this guy decided that he would flash them, which was quite distressing. And in those days, when you reported things to the police,

they came and spoke to us. And honest to God, the police asked the girls for a description in this guy and not one of them could say what his face looked like. There was a flasher when I was in prime school. I think I was only about eight or nine, and he was at the school gates and our teachers. I don't remember seeing anything, but I just remember our teachers,

gathering us all together and, like, pushing us all back indoors. So it happened probably when I was in my mid-20s. I was running on the outskirts leads in a sort of semi-rural area. And I was sort of aware in my peripheral vision of this vehicle and this person stood next to it to my left. And I heard this whistle which made me turn round. And he exposed himself to me. And he was still in fairly sort of close proximity at that point. So it took me a couple of seconds to actually realize what was going on.

And then I felt really scared. And then I went home and sort of phone the police about it. But even when I was phoned the police, I was thinking, do people phone the police about this kind of thing? I was about 15. And I was walking from the tube station to my dad's. And I started hearing this, like, funny, heavy breathing behind me. And I looked around, and there was a young man having a wank

with his penis out following me along the road I got flashed when I was about I must have been about 10, maybe 11 I was getting the bus home from school and I'd missed my stop so I had to get off the bus like one or two stops late

and I was walking back down and like off the main road there was these like ginnles like busy main road like lots of cars and traffic and up one of these ginnles was just a guy stood there as I walk past like face covered with his baseball cap and had a penis out and was kind of jiggling it around.

Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister. Today, we are looking into the history of policing in decent exposure with Professor Kim Stevenson. But first we're going to speak to Professor of Psychology, Dr. Elizabeth Jeglick, to ask the question, why do people flash? My name is Dr. Elizabeth Jeglick, and I am a professor of psychology at the John J.J. College of Criminal Justice. in New York. I study sexual violence prevention. Some of our most recent research suggests that about 4% of individuals have exhibitionistic interests, meaning that they are aroused by exposing themselves to, or the thought of exposing themselves to unsuspecting and non-consenting individuals,

and about 1 to 2% of the general population will go on to act on those. There are gender differences with men being more likely to engage in exhibitionistic behaviors than women, but again, we don't really know a lot about women who engage in this type of behavior only because women are rarely reported. It's thought to be more acceptable. And some of the laws, if women expose their breast, it's not illegal in some places. And women are generally, seem to be less threatening than men. So the reason that people flash is varied. Some people do it, you know, for a laugh. Some people do it to get attention. We now know that young people are using it as a form of courtship. And so they are, you know, using technology such as smartphones and computers to share images of one another. And all that is

is kind of normative in what we consider to be okay. But on the other end of that spectrum is what we have called exhibitionistic disorder. And that's when people do this as their primary outlet for sexual pleasure. And it's done with non-consenting individuals. And it can cause distress to individuals who experience it. Kind of historically looking at it, this is a behavior that's been around kind of since before BC. And it was really not until the late 1800s that it was identified as a psychological disorder or a deviant sexual act. And so we kind of knew that this wasn't potentially a good thing, but it wasn't until the 1980s that it became a clinical diagnosis as exhibitionism disorder or exhibitionistic disorder. And that is now considered one of the eight parapherias in the

diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. And so what parapherias are, are there unusual attractions or unusual behaviors that cause distress to other people and are usually done with non-consenting individuals? And so exhibitionism is defined as the repetitive act of exposing one's genitals to unsuspecting strangers for the purposes of achieving sexual excitement. And generally, it is thought that no further sexual activity, is wanted with the individual, and sometimes individuals might also masturbate. We know that those who have exhibitionistic disorder tend to have this as their primary sexual outlet. It can be a positive experience in the sense that they get sexually aroused, they masturbate,

and that's what they do. And then some people use it as a self-soothing behavior, so they're feeling down, and then they'll go out and seek someone to expose themselves to, and then they will masturbate their reaction. We know very little in general about exhibitionistic disorder because very few people are actually caught for it. And then the people we have studied are the ones that have done it numerous times. People have also asked individuals who have experienced it so they've been flashed themselves about the prevalence of exhibitionistic disorder. And it's estimated that anywhere between one third and half of all women have been flashed.

And it was initially thought to be a nuisance behavior. And so it wasn't taken so seriously by authority. but we're now kind of recognizing that it does have long-term effects and people do feel unsafe. And there is some evidence now to suggest that there is a small portion of individuals who engage in these exhibitionistic acts who do go on to make contact sexual offenses. So it is considered to be a sex crime, but a non-contact sex crime. Thank you so much, Dr. Elizabeth, for taking the time to explain some of the psychology behind this crime. Now we're going to speak to Professor Kim Stevenson about how,

indecent exposure and other sexual offences have been policed in the UK. Let's do it. So, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets Professor Kim Stevenson. How are you? Yeah, we're good this morning, thank you, Kate, although the forecasts are looking pretty horrendous later. It is very grey and drizzly, Oop North as well. It's not panning out to be a great day, which is why I'm even happier to be here talking to you about this fascinating subject, the history of indecent exposure. How did you get into this research? That's a good question.

So for the last 20 years, I've been researching the history of sex crimes, so rape, child abuse, and as part of that, indecency, and other sort of what they would call more minor offences. I don't like that term because they're not minor for anybody that's been subjected to them. But yeah, that's kind of how it all came about. It's such an interesting history. And I suppose what I'll start with is what counts as public indecency? Well, there's two perspectives to that,

because there's the concept of public indecency in terms of what the public, you and I would think is indecent. So the moral majority, if you like, or the great and good kind of deciding what isn't tax acceptable behaviour. And then there's the indecency from a legal perspective, which is criminalised, which law defines and determines, is something, you know, that is behaviour which should be punished if you're found breaking the law on that particular provision. Because it's kind of, when you sort of stop and think about it, I mean, the laws are important, obviously, and we'll get to that.

But it's kind of bonkers that we have a situation where things that you do just at home are completely fine. But then when you change the location, then it's indecent. Like the idea that your body is just indecent in its natural state. And actually, law can intervene in the home on occasion as well. And I suppose the big debate about that all happened in 1957. The Wolfenden Report, which is when the discussions were going on about sort of legalisation of homosexuality, and kind of pulling on John Stuart Mill series in the 19th century about when law should step in. And both Mill and the Wolfenden Report concluded that there is an area of private morality

where it's not for the law or the state to criminalise behaviour. So yes, you should be able to do what you would. ones in the privacy of your own home. But yeah, historically, that's not always been the case. No, and if you do these things outside of the home, then the law will get involved. Absolutely. I remember there was a couple that got caught having sex and was it Domino's Pizza in 2017. It's not funny.

I don't know I'm laughing. It kind of makes you smile because of the location, I suppose. That's it, isn't it? But yes, having sex in the Domino's pizza, while the staff were there looking on and other people viewing is that appropriate behaviour, you know, where are the parameters between what is acceptable in public and what isn't? And of course, that's not the only example. I've got a few more I can give you as we go through. And also that sort of situation presents problems for the law because it's not per se an offence to have sex in the domino's piece. You know, it's not actually

written in any kind of statutes anywhere. So you have to find some kind of provision that would cover that and then that becomes questionable because you're then using perhaps legal provisions that weren't intended or designed for that particular situation. God, that's interesting. So there isn't a law that says you can't have sex in a domino's pizza or just in a restaurant. But we can all kind of look at that and go, that's not on. You shouldn't be doing that. But what law do you use to say we need to punish this behaviour? That's fascinating. Because it's consensual. So because it's consensual and they're both adults, then most of the provisions under sexual offence law wouldn't apply because obviously they're designed to protect vulnerable people and situations where there is no consent or children or other vulnerable individuals don't have the capacity to consent because they don't know what it is or understand what it is they're consenting to. So I suppose people being forced to watch that weren't consenting.

True. And so that's where law should step in. protect their interests and that's that justification of causing public harm to the wider public. I don't know if it would have been any better if it was anywhere else though. Even if you'd upscaled it to like the Ivy or the Ritz,

it would still be, no, you really shouldn't do that. No, and they both ended up getting, I think it was it 23 hours community service? You just kind of want to sit down and just go like, was it just so, I suppose, when the passion takes you, I suppose. But it raises interesting points about who gets to decide what's indecent? Because that's sort of at the crux of all the ethical implications around

this is who is saying what's decent and what's indecent. Absolutely. And historically, of course, it was the church. So if you go way, way back, it's the Church, Church of England that's setting standards and guidelines about what is acceptable moral behaviour. And they have ecclesiastical courts and other ways, of course, of ensuring that you follow those guidelines, those moral guidelines. And at one stage, they even dealt with cases of incest and sexual assaults. And if you go back to medieval times, you perhaps had to go and stand with the board in public or repenting what you had done. And then gradually the 19th century, things start to change as there's a more secular move towards controlling, regulating immoral conduct behavior. And it's

widest context and definition. So at the beginning of the 19th century, you start to see, the great and the good, the bourgeoisie, sort of right-minded volunteers wanting to ensure that the masses behave in accordance to their expectations. And so gradually, lots of voluntary groups develop on a whole range of subjects. So indecency becomes a huge catch-all as a kind of concept, which covers not just things to do with sexual issues, but betting, gambling, indecent advertising. literature. So it all comes under this big heading as the century develops. And the church at the beginning are quite reluctant because they're losing their power to let kind of the state and

the broader public take on that control. But once laws are passed that punish those behaviours, then the church will accept the legitimacy of it because then it's a state that's taking control. So yeah, quite an interesting dynamic going on. The church would have had no truck whatsoever with people having sex in year old pizza hut, would they? That wouldn't have been 24 hours of communication. No, and of course, those kind of Christian perspectives have informed law a lot. I mean, today isn't a subject to talk about rape, for example, but the concept of rape is very much based on the Anglican expectation

that sex is only for procreation and therefore sex can only be per vagina. So that's why, again, you never had any kind of. recognition until 20th century of, you know, sex perennem or oral sex or anything else being sort of criminalised because it was a very, very narrow interpretation of what sex was. So how would those crimes have been punished before those laws were recognised or would they not have been? Yeah, well, rape's always been a crime that's been punished. But initially, it was called Violentis concubis. It meant that sort of medieval times, Elizabethan times, you had to that a woman had been abducted and then that a man had violated her because she was her husband's

property and so it was the abduction and the violation of his property that were more important than the sexual violation of her and it was an amendable crime which meant that the offender could then be liable to pay compensation to the husband or her father for the damage to his daughter his wife because she was now spoiled goods. Oh my God. I think I remember reading somewhere once that it was a crime subject to gradation in seriousness, depending on who the victim was. So if it was a young virginal high-class woman, that was much more serious than a poor widow, for example. Absolutely.

And stereotypical sort of expectations of how women should behave. And that came through very strongly in the Victorian period, that you needed to be respectable. So if you went out, you had to wear your hat, your gloves. You had to have your companion with you, your protector with you, you would never go out on your own at night. And so, yeah, this kind of gradation. So prostitutes, for example, could not be rape. Of course they can, but it wasn't accepted because that was their profession. And so it was assumed that they would always consent.

Male rape wasn't recognised until 1994. It was thought that elderly women would be less affected by rape. No. Oh. Because you've lived your life. God, that's fucked up. But these are all myths. But the problem with myths is they infect the law

and they infect jury beliefs and they're used by defence barristers when representing a person accused to try and convince the jury that this woman is not a reliable witness. This woman, you know, isn't the genuine victim. You think about how few cases of sexual assault and rape actually make it to court today.

And then you think about what people were up against in the past. It's amazing that anybody bought any cases forward at all ever when you've got to go through something like that, stand in a courtroom full of men and they're all going to explain that it can't have bothered you that much because you're not 22 anymore. That's just, I can't get my head around it. And it's not just the courtroom.

So what you've got to remember is that women have had no voice in the law in terms of making the law or contributing to the legislation So the first time that women had any say in the laws that really affect them, and I'm not decrying male victims. I mean, that's important as well, but we know that 90% of sexual offences generally are against women or children. And it was David Blunkett, funnily enough, who was the first person actually encouraged and deliberately went out to get women involved in drafting the Sexual Offenses Act 2003. So before that, all the law had only ever been written by men because there were no women in Parliament until 20th century. So the legislation is drafted by men. As you say, if you're the victim, who you're going to tell,

all the police were, of course, men because there were no police women, really, until the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. You would have had to have gone to a court where all the judiciary would be men, or the lawyers would be men. And it wouldn't just be one barrister. They would have their assistance with them. And so there's pictures of 19th century courtroom with, I don't know, at the old Bailey, you could have 50 men in that courtroom and you're the only female or the jurors are men

because women cannot be a juror until again the 20th century because of the rules of owning property. So yeah, a very hostile, masculine environment. So you'd have to be one very brave lady to go with that. But you're in a rock and a hard place because obviously if you'd been raped in that period, then you would lose your respectability just by the fact that you had been raped. so you've then got to bring a case to prove that it was rape and that it wasn't consensual, you know, to maintain your respectability. Otherwise, you're never going to be able to get married. You're going to be kind of shunned.

Having said all of that, there are examples of actually, you know, quite significant convictions. So if you put yourself through all that and provided you are respectable and you'd need witnesses, male witnesses, of course, to testify, you know, that you're a good girl and you follow all the tropes because the defendant will also have his witnesses to come and try and convince the court that actually he didn't do it because he was respectable and it was, you know, the blame was on her. Oh, and of course, I forgot to mention as well that if it was rape, you had to fight back. So the court would expect to see the bruises. They'd expect to have witnesses here. You scream. You had to do everything you could to protect your modesty.

Oh my God. If you did all that, then the chances of conviction would be good. But yeah, a big ask. And you can't possibly imagine what it must have been like. No. Mind-boggling, it really is. So what was happening around this time, kind of in this situation where it's very male, it's just a very patriarchal system because that's what it was.

It seems to be quite hostile to women. What was happening in the 19th century to change the laws around indecent exposure? At what point did someone go, we need laws about this? So nobody really said we need laws. Sometimes what happens with crime and cases is somebody will do something somewhere in the country and other people will go, oh, that's not right. And you see it particularly with sexual offences. If you think of child abuse cases, we're always playing catch-up

because ordinary people cannot conceive what others can do to children. So you pass laws within the kind of knowledge sphere that you've got and you can accept. Not accept, that's probably a long word, but you acknowledge what might happen to children. And then someone will come along and they'll do something and you could never have conceived of that because we can't think that way. Does that make sense?

Taking it back to sort of indecent exposure, it was quite an innocuous incident, really, in 1809. So nice hot summer's day, Brighton Beach, and a man called Trundon decided he was going to go for a swim. So he stripped off on the beach, went swimming. And there were complaints from residents. So for a time in this area, soldiers had regularly gone swimming, but then they built a row of houses. And the people moving into the houses could then see if anyone went swimming on the beach and going to the local magistrate.

So then it's local communities thinking, well, what do we do? Is that acceptable? And they decide, no, that's not right. You know, families shouldn't be able to see men bathing naked and getting undressed. And so they try and come up with some sort of offence that he could be. be guilty of. So there's no clear offence, but there is this sort of historic, we call them common law offences. So these are crimes that in the past have been recognised by the judiciary. They've not been passed by Parliament. So they're not in legislation. They're not in the acts of Parliament. They're not written down. But because the judges have confirmed convictions on occasion, it becomes part of the law. And the law originally was all common law. It was only

sort of in the modern era, 18th century onwards, that you start to get, you know, legislation coming through. So they come up with, what can we charge him with? Well, we're charging with outraging public decency because that's what he's done. And it goes to court, and the court actually asks itself, is it an offence for someone, you know, if they do what he did, this conduct, should it be unlawful?

And they ask themselves that question and decide, yes, it is, and convict him. But they say, because it's a first, situation this has happened, we shan't punish you, but we are sending a message out that this kind of conduct is not acceptable. And so hence we have a precedent, which other courts will follow, and then it's how broadly that precedent can be interpreted. And so we get to the situation right at the beginning that you mentioned about the pizza shop. And so that provision from 1809 is sort of updated and used in 2017, along with lots of other situations.

situations on route, which in some cases have nothing to do with any kind of sexual connotation per se. So can you remember in 1990 the gallery's case? So there was a famous gallery in London and one of the art installations in the front window was a female dummy's head, but the earrings were freeze-dried fetuses, aborted fetuses. Oh God, no, I don't remember that one. That would cause a stir, wouldn't it? And of course, there was no crime written down in any statute book that would cover that kind of situation. No.

So again, it's what do the authorities do? Lots of public outraged by that, outraging public decency. And they were convicted. The artist and the curator were both convicted and fined £600.000. Wow. So that's how it can be broadly interpreted. So that was 1990. Another example from 1962, very very, very.

very famous case that went all the way up to the House of Lords is the highest court. DPP against Shaw. And Shaw was a bit of an entrepreneur. And he saw a gap in the market for men that needed to find contact details of prostitutes rather than going out on the street. If you could buy a gazetteer that's got a list of names in. And you knew where they lived. Yeah, great.

So he actually went to the Metropolitan Police and said to them, if I put a book together with all these names in, would I be breaking the law? to which the Meta said, no, there's no law that we know of that would cover that particular, you know, situation. So he went ahead, did his book. And, of course, a lot of moral campaigners were upset by that. Yes. Put pressure on the Attorney General. You know, we can't have this.

You need to do something. What do we charge him with? Corrupting public decency. Outraging public decency. This old offence would, you know, kind of cover that situation. So the case goes to the House of Lords. and yeah, he ends up being convicted. And that creates another precedent.

It's kind of a bonkers law, because to outrage public decency, you have to check whether or not the public is outraged. And it's just a mental image of just people being stood around this guy's swimming and are you outraged? Are you outraged? How outraged are we all? And then, like, if one person's outraged, is that enough to secure, no.

It doesn't need to be outraged. So that's a really good question. So this is why the offence is used for so many different circumstances. answers. For two reasons, if we go back to indecent exposure again in a minute, you've got to show that there's some intent, there's some, you know, bad motive to want to harm or upset somebody, and that's got to be proved, which is sometimes quite difficult. For outraging public decency, there's no intent, just the fact you commit the offence. You haven't got to show that you intended necessarily to harm anybody. Right. And also, you haven't got to show that the public were, in fact,

outraged just that two people were present who may have been outraged if they'd have seen it. Oh. So it's quite vague. That is very vague. I mean, you might have two people like, no, I'm all right with this, but that's... But you've got to judge it on the basis of what Lord Denning used to call the man on the Clapham Omnibus. So the man on the Clapham Omnibus is Mr. or Miss, well, it was Mr. because it was

1960s when Denning said the 70s. But the reasonable man, what would the reason? always the reasonable man, never the reasonable woman. What would the reasonable man think was appropriate behaviour? And this is imaginary hypothetical. So if you put the reasonable man in the room, would he think that, you know, creating this lady's directory or having sex in a domino's pizza shop, would he think that that was, you know, outraging public decency? Wow. And of course, the answer to that would be, yes. But the more controversial thing is less the fact that he was convicted of the outrageous public decency, but the fact that when he put his book together,

there was no law that he had broken. No. And so he's convicted of being retrospectively, which nowadays you couldn't do because that would violate the European Convention of Human Rights Article 7. But at the time, he's being convicted of something that wasn't illegal at the time he did it, and that goes against the rule of law. But the House of Law has agreed that the offense should stand. Raging hypocrites as well, I researched the history of sex work,

And I'll guarantee that all of those MPs in they're going, yeah, I'd definitely outraged, definitely outraged, we'll have used those particular services before. I'll be back with Kim after this short break. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British.

See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. Let's talk about indecent exposure because this is fascinating because it's a

really sad situation, but most people I know have been flashed. I've certainly been flashed. Me, when I was 17, 18, yeah. And it's, for a long time, it was kind of almost, I suppose people like almost looked at as if it was funny that it wasn't serious. And it always is, is it's a really unpleasant, nasty thing to do. When did laws come in particularly around that? And how, so you would have to prove that you intended to upset someone to prosecute that. Yes, and therein lies the problem. So the first reference to indecent exposure is in 1824. So this was the Vagrancy Act.

So there was a number of pieces of legislation in the Victorian area where they put together different kinds of conduct or behaviour into one statute, you know, to make sure that people behaved properly. And in 1824, Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act made it a defence to willfully, openly, lewdly, obscenely, expose the person with intent to insult a female. Or specifically a female? Yeah, so it's only male against woman. The person is literally the penis.

And to prove that it was willfully, openly, rudely, they would require evidence that his penis was erect at the time because otherwise he could say that he was just having a pee or taking a leak. So when I was young, 16, 17, 18, and it was a typical kind of stereotype, you always thought as a stereotype, didn't you? the man with a brown mark. Yes. And I was flashed once.

I once have known what I saw in those days. I mean, it's a different generation, you know, and to describe where, I mean, I think now women, girls are a lot more informed about parts of the body than my generation were. Yeah. So, yeah, you didn't really know quite what had happened. And so I think that's part of it as well,

that sort of, you were saying the little bit of kind of humor almost to it. It was a way of dealing with it, wasn't it? And it kind of happened to everybody. So that was one problem that it was really hard to prove because it often happened so quickly, you know, that you don't actually see or you'd be too embarrassed to say whether it was erect or not. And how do you prove that? Like, how do you describe that?

How do you prove that he was erect when he could have just been innocently stood there on the street with his penis out, as you do, in a flaccid state? That's... I don't know how he proved that. I think it was really hard to explain it today. Even today, we still feel a little bit embarrassed because we haven't got the language, have we, to drive parts of the body in a way that we all feel comfortable with.

Because you either fall back relying on medical terms, you know, penis vagina, which again, you know, despite like DeVina's best efforts in everybody else's, it still feels. So what happened in the 19th century, and that's another thing that we didn't mention when we were talking about the women in court, they didn't have the language to actually explain what had happened to them. because in the 1820s, language was censored, sexual language. So the dictionary was Bodler-Eyes. His name was Bodler, and he took out lots of these.

I think I read somewhere there were sort of like 900 words for penis and 200, 300 for, you know, vagina. But these are all taken out of the lexicon in the Victorian period. And if you're the victim, again, you're in a rock and a hard place because you can't talk in any kind of sexualised language, because that would show you up as being a bad girl because you knew about sex and you weren't supposed to. So how do you describe without any words?

So when you look at the report, they all use this really vague wording like he affected his purpose or he took indecent liberties, she was distressed, she fainted, which is quite hard obviously to interpret from the 20, 21st century perspective, to try and work out what actually happened. Yeah. So you've got to make some kind of assumptions really

on what you think may have happened and piecing together the circumstances and everything else. And certainly the first time it happened to me, the first time I was ever flashed, I was a child and we were on a school bus and we were going on a school trip, and this guy was driving in a car behind us and we were all like waving out the back window.

And then suddenly he just started masturbating whilst driving. And I had no idea what I'd seen, to be completely honest, is it just felt weird. He was like, why is he waving with that? And he's driving with that. Do you care and attention? I know, exactly. Like double whammy.

I'm just, but I don't know if I could have explained that to anyone. We certainly didn't tell any adults. I think because we felt we'd done something wrong as well. And like you said, even though now we have more words and more sensitive policing all the rest of it, I wouldn't have known what I'd just seen. No, absolutely. So that was the first offence. And then there was another offence in 1847, which was a little bit easy to prove,

it still wanted willful intent. So that's why perhaps very few cases of indecent exposure. In fact, Dave Cox, my colleague, I put Wolverhampton, did some research on the judicial statistics. And between 1857 and 1930, there was only an average of 23 cases of indecent exposure reported. This is England and Wales. Oh, wow. And because there were so few in 1930, they stopped recording them as a separate category. So then it's hard to pick them out of a more general classification of sort of minor sexual offences, if you like. And I think that's mainly because it was so difficult to prove and because people, women, didn't go and report it because, you know, the things we've just been saying. So in 2003, they updated it. But it's

still the same problem that you've got to show that he intended to cause some harm. And whenever you use that word, there's got to be some intent, he only needs to turn around and say, well, I was just desperate, you know, I just needed to have a peat. Which talked back to the indecency thing. Yeah. So now you can see, while the outraging public decency offence is an easy one to use because it doesn't require having to show that willfulness. Yes, I can.

And I was gobsmight looking at this yesterday. I thought I'd do a little bit of searching around on the web. And to find that Thames Valley in 2021 recorded 300 offences of outranging public. decencies. I'm thinking, what is, what is going on in terms of what is going on there? I've not heard it, you know, in other forces and obviously it'd be interesting to try and see if other forces have used this. And there was one report, and obviously it was when they were dealing with some of these at probably Reading magistrates or one of the courts in Berkshire. And there were five cases listed. And one was a man masturbating in his car. Perennial favorite.

One was another man masturbating on a train. A couple were dogging on a, um, memorial in a recreation ground. And a woman was dancing naked outside Reading police station. Ah, I kind of respect that one. So you can see the broadness of sort of situations that this one common law offence that isn't written down in statute that has only ever been kind of confirmed by the judiciary can be useful. I can see that now actually because that's, you sort of need a law where it's just like,

look, I don't care whether or not you intended to do. You can't get your knob out, like, in public. You just can't do it. I can definitely see the benefits of that. Can I ask you, as somebody that's researched this for, like, your career, do you have any sense of what the motivation is behind these offences? Because I've always, like, what's the payoff from somebody that flashes and exposes and sends dickpicks that nobody's asked for?

Like, what is going on there psychologically? It's a really good question. And even the psychiatrist haven't bottomed or psychologists that one. some flashes are potential child abusers because they'll start doing something like that knowing that it's unlikely they'll get caught and they're kind of testing themselves out if that makes sense it's a bit like sort of you know

child porn you know watching child porn and then going on and committing you know offences with children so there's that side of it but they're not all potential child abusers really I've no idea it's like rape you start off when you study rape trying to understand why you try and understand child abuses. You know, we can put men on the moon, but we haven't yet worked out,

why men commit such horrendous, diverse acts. I mean, when did it become a crime for women to commit indecent exposure? Yeah, when was that brought into law? When was it recognised that women can do this too? That would be 2003. What? 2003? Yeah, but they could always have been prosecuted under the outraging public decency. So that's what you would have done before.

I think there's a case, might have been in Plymouth, actually, because we had a chief constable here who was very much into policing quite strongly before it was ever really purred of. And I think there was some women on the hoe and they were exposing their breasts. So that offence could be used for that. But breasts now wouldn't be caught because the new offence in 2003 only says genitalia in the wording. Right. So if you exposed your breasts and somebody didn't like that,

only possible would be outraging public decency, which at the moment, I don't think that would probably have much mileage. But there might be times in the future, you know, because that's the other thing, isn't it? Society always changes. It kind of goes quite permissive, and then it'll come back and be more restrictive. And I don't know where we are at the moment. It's just there seems to be lots of people wanting to have sex in public. So I've got one at Plymouth this week, at court, who were having oral sex just down the road from me, 200 metres in the shopping area. Just behave. Oh, my God.

We mentioned the pizza one, but probably the most controversial. So Hyde Park, a BBC 2 music festival in Hyde Park, four families. This was 2015, so a music festival. And there's a couple there, and it's described in court as having a particularly revolting sex act. They were having oral sex while they're watching this BBC 2 concert. They were both in their late 40s. They refused to accept a caution. and they also refused to have the case heard in the magistrates.

They thought it was okay what they were doing. And it went to the old Bailey and the judge said they both needed to be taught a lesson. And you find them £1,000 each. Imagine being that. It's all right. So you've had a bit to drink. You're watching your BBC concert. You've got carried away.

Oh dear. We've done something. But then to absolutely stick to your guns and be like, no, I should be allowed to give somebody a blowjob whilst watching a BBC concert. It's cast. That's a level of commitment I can't quite relate to. I mean, what's the law around, like, I suppose there's flashing with intent. Like, it's definitely a sexual off because presumably what they're kind of getting off on is the fact that somebody's not consenting and they're getting off on that.

What about like the people that run naked across football matches or cricket pitches from time to time? What's their legal streaking, yes. Yeah, so, I mean, that could be outraging public decency if they wanted to charge them with that. but so you've got to put yourself in the situation again, the reasonable person, which would be the reasonable football fan. Would the reasonable football fan, cricket fan, be outraged? Because you've got to kind of, that would be the test. But yeah, potentially, outraging public decency,

but what they normally would charge them with is a public order offence. Right. And today, now there's probably provisions within the football grounds that the stewards have powers, obviously, to come, and the football ground would probably deal with it rather than the police as in the past. Yeah, okay, yeah. So nobody do that if you're thinking about listening to it.

That one still, no, don't do it. Even though you might not outrage football fans. But the laws are changing around this. I, because of the nature of what I research and that I sort of post a lot of it on social media, I get sent a lot of peculiar things. I get just an absolute tsunami of dickpicks until I turned off always for people to be able to contact me.

and I've been endlessly fascinated by what's the psychology behind this. Like, what is their success ratio of, you know, does anyone ever get back to them and go, oh, hello, thank you for sending me a picture of your penis. That's very kind of, thank you for taking the time. But I did get sent, like some really, really weird stuff. And I was kind of sat with it going, I don't know what laws there are about this. And I did report it to the police. And I'm not going to go into it too much because, you know, things are pending.

But they did take it seriously. They did find the person. And charges have been brought. And that feels quite new to me. Is that like cyber flashing? It's not new in the sense of sending. It's the equivalent of sending material through the post. And so in the early 1900s, part of the indecency agenda,

one of the indecency offences was sending inappropriate or obscene or indecent. And then you've got to define indecent material through the post under the Telecommunications Act. So this is the modern equivalent. So obviously the internet now is the equivalent of. the post in the past. So that would be, you know, one charge that they could bring, because that's, I think, Telecommunications Act, 19... There's certainly modern legislation that would cover sending that kind of obscene material through. But again, you would need a witness, a victim,

yourself, and identify where it came from. I mean, it could come through. It could be under the pornography legislation, couldn't it? I mean, at least I don't have to struggle with proving whether or not he was erect at the time. There's no saying, just sent these because I needed. It's right there, all the evidence of exactly what this person was doing. And talk to me a little bit about the offence of what's called upskirting, because that was brought in within a few years. And I guess this is an example of when the law changes because people didn't conceive

that somebody could do something and then we were, oh, yes, they have. But that's changed, hasn't it? Absolutely, yes. So it was a case in 2007, and he's a barrister of all people. Dear. Yeah. So, and he carries around with him a secret camera, and he's recording, you know, video, looking up girls and women's skirts. The police do a raid, I'm not quite sure why or how, whether that was probably maybe related to perhaps some child investigation that was going on more generally.

And when they do the raid, they find 20 hours of recorded video, including one with a 14-year-old girl, I think. And again, they're in a rock and a hard place. what do we charge him with? Because the sexual offences provisions, David Blunkett's legislation had been so carefully thought through to try and cover every conceivable eventuality. But there was nothing in there

because there'd been no assault. He hadn't touched her. They couldn't do him under voyeurism because of the way that the legislation for voyeurism was written because the women were unaware, so you didn't really have a victim, if you know what I mean? Yes. They didn't know he was looking up their skirts

because it was a secret camera. So there were all kind of problems with the offences, which had been really carefully drafted. So the fallback provision again was to use outrageous public decency, which is what they did, and he was convicted, and the conviction was upheld. And then there was a proposal in Parliament

to bring in a change to the law to amend the Sexual Offences Act, so that now it is covered by legislation rather than using the common law offence. But yeah, it's a prime example of not knowing, you know, what might happen next kind of. of thing. And it's a really interesting one from a legal perspective, isn't it? Like, what crime has been committed? And it's, oh dear. Now, I understand that you before becoming a professor and a historian,

you were a police officer. Yes, Nottingham. That was my first job. Presumably, then, you must have encountered a lot of sort of indecent exposure cases. And how have you seen the shift in your career? Like, what's changed between when you started and now when it comes to indecent exposure? Not the act itself, that's remained pretty constant, but how it's reported and treated. Yeah. We used to get quite a few reports, and if we could find out who it was,

they'd usually just get cautioned. It wasn't something that you would necessarily prosecute at court unless they'd got previous records of it. So it was kind of downgraded, I guess, in that sense. And that was kind of part of that era as well, where I can remember cases with young girls being abused, and they were blamed. you know, there wasn't the understanding that there might be a reason why they had.

And I'll use the word agreed rather than consent. You know, they hadn't consent. So that side was very, very different. So the good news is I think things have changed and there's much better awareness, there's much better under, especially with children than there was, certainly in the 70s and the 80s. With indecent exposure, I'm kind of almost surprised it's come up again, you know. It sort of seemed to, well, I think it's not so much the indecent exposure.

It's this thing with the Thames Valley Police that surprised me more than anything. The sheer number of cases. And then going back to your point, you said about what do you think it is with them sending all these pictures. But then the kids are doing that. I mean, they're sending naked photographs of themselves, aren't they?

And that's been normalized. I mean, we need to have some kind of education around it. Because I think the genies out of the bottle now is that people, I don't think you can put this stuff back in. You can't undo the technology, can you? And we are starting to shift the blame culture to if you've sent someone a picture of yourself nude and they show it to everybody, that's not actually your fault. That's them being horrible. But it's a slow process, isn't it?

And I don't think that people, when they're very young, when they're teenagers and they kind of get all excited about it, fully grasp that if you send it, it's there then. It's there, isn't it? And it's, you know, never send somebody something that you wouldn't be happy with being put on the internet. Absolutely. And a lot of it is sometimes mistaken sending, isn't it? You think you sent it to one person, but it's ended up going to others because you press the wrong button or you're doing it quickly. So you didn't check who you were sending it to, yeah. Or you trusted the person. I mean, I've sent nudes to people before.

And then I look back and I just think, really, Kate, like that could just pop up on, you know, like an enormous amount of trust that you put in someone to just, you know, go, here's a picture of my boobs. Please don't show that to anybody else? Is that a crime now? They call it revenge porn, don't they? Is that sharing without people's consent? Yes. So that would be an offence. if you pass that on, but the police aren't going to be able to deal with thousands of teenage boys.

That's the other thing in it, is where are the resources? It's probably not something that they would see, really. They obviously accept this is the law is broken, it's their responsibility to deal with that. But it's too big a problem, if you know what I mean, for them to deal with on their own. It needs parents. Yeah. Well, as an interview this week with a head of a school and one of her former pupils who's now in her 20s, but this had happened to her when she was at school.

She'd sent a nude to who she thought was the boyfriend. and it ended up going all around school. And the head teacher was just saying that they're almost at their wits end because they've done everything they can think of to try and talk, educate, blah, blah, blah, but it's still happening. Do you think we're almost in the 1820s again

that we're in a period, almost at a tipping point where things have perhaps become too immoral, inverted commas, that there might soon start to be almost, I don't know, you know, the moral campaigners and a backlash against that. I don't know, but it can't be right that people are just going and having sex in music. And that's without the music festivals that the youngsters are going to.

I mean, well, I know the people. It must be happening there. And they'd be less offended. But there's something not quite wrong. I think that the internet and mobile phones have had a profound shift on how we regard public and private acts. Because you're effectively carrying something around in your pocket that can show you the most intimate acts. but then if you show it to somebody else, then it's created this kind of strange,

I don't know how you get teenagers to stop sending pictures of their bodies to each other. It's such a difficult. I suppose because then if they want to, I suppose, then that's one issue, isn't it? But it's then what happens when that gets out is trying to educate people about the consequences of this can be quite spectacular.

And it's not just the sharing of the indecent photos, it's then the boys are going on and reading the porn, aren't they? They're all seeing the porn online. and then when they're meeting girls, you know, trying to form relationships, their expectations aren't what, you know, there's a real mismatch between what they're expecting girls to do and what, you know, it's acceptable behaviour. And again, we're in the realms of immorality there again, aren't we? We are. And kids are learning about sex from porn and that's quite a dangerous precedent because porn isn't real sex. Is there not the people in that film aren't actually having sex like that. If you panned back, you'd see the guy stood there with a sound boom and a sandwich and you don't, like, none of it is real.

And that's quite terrifying, I think. But again, what can the law do? It's a very interesting idea, isn't it? Outrage in public decency. Kim, you have been amazing to talk to. I have loved talking to you about this. Thank you so much. It's great.

It's fun. Thank you. Yes. Yeah. Lovely. If people want to know more about you and more about your work and not send you obscene pictures or flat at you in the street, They just want to just send you nice things or talk to you. Where can they find you?

At Plymouth University. So if they just put my name in in Plymouth University, the email address will come up. Thank you so much for talking to me today. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself. And some great questions. So thank you very much. It's been good, really good, enjoyed it.

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Kim and Elizabeth for sharing your time and your knowledge and your expertise. And if you found this episode interesting, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts join me again betwixt the sheets the history of sex scandal and society a podcast by history hit this podcast includes music by epidemic sounds