2024 Olympics: Japanese volleyball players equipped with anti-voyeur outfits

In Japan, voyeurism targeting female athletes is a real scourge. People attend sports competitions, particularly gymnastics or athletics, with the aim of photographing these young women in sportswear, highlighting their private parts. Some go so far as to use infrared cameras, which allow them to “undress” the targeted subjects…

In response to this situation, the Japanese company Mizuno, in collaboration with the national women’s volleyball team, qualified for the Paris Olympic Games, has developed a special fabric to protect against this type of device, reports the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun.

In Paris, the Japanese volleyball players will wear a jersey made from this fabric. “Six other disciplines, such as table tennis, archery and hockey have made the same choice,” adds the newspaper. “This fabric will be worn by top athletes. I hope it will send a message to society as a whole that voyeurism is unacceptable,” Kazuya Tajima, a member of the Mizuno team that designed the fabric, was quoted as saying by the daily.

Middle school and high school girls

The company’s initiative is part of the country’s ongoing fight against voyeurism targeting sportswomen. In the case of rhythmic and sports gymnastics, the national federation of the discipline and the departmental organizations that manage middle school and high school competitions are implementing a control system, for example prohibiting the use of telephoto lenses of more than 201 millimeters in championships, explains the daily Mainichi Shimbun.

The Fukuoka Prefectural Council in southern Japan went so far as to pass a decree against voyeurism in March, reports the Japanese edition of Huffington Post. The text describes as “sexual violence” any act of filming or taking photographs of people in sports centres for sexual purposes without their consent, whether they are dressed or not. A new development is the psychological suffering of victims caused by the dissemination or reuse of these images. A step forward “significant”, then greeted Tomoshi Sakka, lawyer and expert on the case, interviewed by the site.