Paris has launched an urgent hunt for spy cameras and peepholes in the city’s public swimming pool changing rooms following a spate of complaints from women about men trying to film them.
The action comes after journalist Laurène Daycard spoke about catching a man filming her while she was getting changed at the George Hermant swimming pool in the city’s 19th arrondissement.
Ms Daycard said after her assailant was arrested, police informed her the man confessed to filming women and “very young girls” without their consent.
“I hesitated to post this message. It disgusts me,” she wrote on Instagram earlier this month.
She said there had been at least 17 similar reports in recent months, and urged women who thought they might have been victims to contact the police.
In response, Paris announced it would audit all 40 municipal pools to identify any structural weaknesses and run daily checks to find “any fixtures or holes that could encourage voyeurism”.
“Women must be able to feel safe in all public facilities, and particularly in swimming pools, which are places of well-being and sport,” a City of Paris statement said.
“The City of Paris is and will remain mobilised to ensure that Parisian swimming pools remain safe places, accessible to all, where no woman should give up going for fear of being assaulted. The City will always stand by the victims.”
As well as inspecting all changing rooms, the city said it would increase staff training in surveillance and prevention as well as victim support, and create a new poster campaign against sexist and sexual violence to go in all municipal pools.
The city said it would also set up a working group including pool manager and victims' associations to find long-term solutions to the problem.
The issue of men filming women without their permission shot to national attention in France due to the case of Dominique Pelicot who was sentenced to 20 years in prison late last year for orchestrating dozens of rapes of his wife Gisèle Pelicot.
Pelicot’s crimes against his wife were uncovered after he was caught upskirting women in a supermarket.
After Ms Daycard posted about her experience, her comments were filled with women who had had similar experiences across the years in France. One woman wrote of a similar experience at a pool in Lyon, while other women said they had avoided certain pools for years after they had been harassed by male swimmers.
In a video, another reporter, Anouck Renaud, said she had a similar experience at a different Parisian swimming pool a year and a half ago, but her complaint was still pending.
“I'm speaking out today in the hope that it will change things. No, there was no sexual assault in the physical sense of the word. But that doesn't change what happened. It's an invasion of my privacy, that's what it was. It's a crime,” she said.
City of Paris deputy mayor Pierre Rabadan, who is in charge of the city’s pools, urged women to come forward if they had experienced such behaviour, telling the Times the city had received few reports.
“Since 2020, I have had only four or five … We need reports so this can be reduced as much as possible,” he said.
