In the case of R v Jarvis, the Supreme Court of Canada held that for the purposes of that law, the expectation of privacy is not all-or-nothing; rather there are degrees of privacy, and although secondary-school pupils in the school building cannot reasonably expect as much privacy as in the bedroom, nonetheless they can expect enough privacy so that photographing them without their consent for the purpose of sexual gratification is forbidden.In some countries voyeurism is considered to be a sex crime. In the United Kingdom, for example, non-consensual voyeurism became a criminal offence on May 1, 2004. In the English case of R v Turner (2006), the manager of a sports centre filmed four women taking showers. There was no indication that the footage had been shown to anyone else or distributed in any way. The defendant pleaded guilty. The Court of Appeal confirmed a sentence of nine months imprisonment to reflect the seriousness of the abuse of trust and the traumatic effect on the victims. In another English case in 2009, R v Wilkins (2010), a man who filmed his intercourse with five of his lovers for his own private viewing was sentenced to eight months in prison and ordered to sign onto the Sex Offender Register for ten years.
Voyeurs were well-paying hole-lookers in especially Parisian brothels, a commercial innovation described as far back as 1857 but not gaining much notoriety until the 1880s, and not attracting formal medical-forensic recognition until the early 1890s. Society has accepted the use of the term voyeur as a description of anyone who views the intimate lives of others, even outside of a sexual context. This term is specifically used regarding reality television and other media which allow people to view the personal lives of others. This is a reversal from the historical perspective, moving from a term which describes a specific population in detail, to one which describes the general population vaguely. One of the few historical theories on the causes of voyeurism comes from psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalytic theory proposes that voyeurism results from a failure to accept castration anxiety and as a result of failure to identify with the father. Prevalence
Voyeurism has high prevalence rates in most studied populations. Voyeurism was initially believed to only be present in a small portion of the population. This perception changed when Alfred Kinsey discovered that 30% of men prefer coitus with the lights on. This behaviour is not considered voyeurism by todays diagnostic standards, but there was little differentiation between normal and pathological behaviour at the time. Subsequent research showed that 65% of men had engaged in peeping, which suggests that this behaviour is widely spread throughout the population. Congruent with this, research found voyeurism to be the most common sexual law-breaking behaviour in both clinical and general populations.