Japan’s Upskirting Problem Now Includes a New Group of Offenders: Children

Japan recorded 9,237 arrests for voyeurism offenses in 2025, the highest figure on record, according to police data cited by CNN. The number reflects a crime the country has tried to curb for years. What has shifted is the profile of who commits it.

Reported voyeurism cases involving minors surged nearly sixfold in 2024 compared with the previous year, and rose again in 2025, according to the same police data. Perpetrators were once almost always adults. Now a growing share are children.

A law written for adults

Japan has layered several measures against covert photography over the past two decades. All smartphones sold in the country must emit a shutter sound when taking photos or videos, an industry measure meant to deter secret recording. Warning posters appear in train stations and public buildings.

In 2023, the government introduced a nationwide law against photo voyeurism as part of a wider overhaul of its sex crime statutes. Before that, prosecutors relied on local ordinances that differed from region to region. The new law expanded the range of conduct that counts as an offense.

Authorities credit part of the rise in arrests to that expanded scope. The spread of smartphones has also made the offense easier to commit and repeat.

None of these measures was designed with child offenders as the central concern. That gap now drives the policy question. Laws built around adult perpetrators do not map cleanly onto cases where a classmate or sibling is the one taking the image.

Inside schools and chatrooms

The shift appears to reach into classrooms. Sumire Nagamori, a cybersecurity expert and child rights activist, told CNN she was shocked to learn the conduct was happening in schools. She noted that an offender can be a classmate, and that images can end up online.

CNN reported finding chatrooms on Telegram and Discord where users posted previews of child sexual abuse material. One video advertised access to a longer clip for less than three dollars. Some users claimed to be in middle or junior high school and said they were willing to photograph classmates or siblings.

Telegram told CNN its moderation systems remove millions of pieces of harmful content each month, including non-consensual material. The company said it removed more than 260,000 groups and channels tied to child sexual abuse material in 2026. Discord did not respond to CNN.

The cost to victims

The human stakes sit behind the statistics. CNN reported the case of a girl, identified under a changed name, who was first targeted at age six by a swimming instructor. The instructor photographed children for more than a decade and shared the images in a Telegram group.

Her father, also identified under a changed name, said he learned of the abuse only when police contacted the family two years ago. Her face and name appeared in some images, making her identifiable. "I feel ashamed that I put my daughter in that situation," he told CNN.

That identifiability points to a problem that outlasts any single arrest. Images that circulate online are difficult to remove, and the harm continues long after the original act.

Why enforcement struggles to keep pace

Nagamori told CNN that several factors push the trend. Smartphones give young people constant access to cameras and online content. Exposure to pornography depicting staged scenarios has shaped behavior in at least some cases; a former teenage offender told CNN he decided to try upskirting after watching such material.

The regulatory challenge is structural. Detection tools and shutter-sound rules target the act of recording. They do little once content moves to encrypted or semi-private platforms. Cross-border messaging services sit outside the direct reach of Japanese sex crime law, which leaves moderation to the companies themselves.

The figures Telegram cites suggest scale rather than resolution. Removing hundreds of thousands of channels in a year indicates how much material keeps appearing.

For policymakers, the data raises questions that the 2023 law did not anticipate. How should a system respond when offenders are minors who are also vulnerable to the same online content? Where does criminal liability sit, and where does child protection take over? Japan's record arrest numbers show the law is catching more cases. They do not yet show it is changing the conditions that produce them.