LA: Campaigners are fighting to close an online forum that promotes the photographing of unsuspecting women for users' sexual gratification. The message board on the wildly popular website Reddit was explicitly created by users who wanted to ogle candid photos that were taken without the subjects' knowledge.
According to the Daily Mail report, the images feature ordinary women on the street, in the gym or even at school who are caught unawares by stealthy 'creeps' with cameras. Most shots focus on the buttocks or breasts of non-consenting women going about their daily lives.
Worse, users admit that 'at least 40 percent' of the images are of underage girls. Some of them appear to be photos a high school teacher took of his students in class.
Other shots appear to have been captured by high school students who target their underage classmates. One user went to far as to offer tips for getting 'creep shots'.
'Don't be nervous,' the advice reads. 'If you are, you'll stand out. Don't hover too much, get your shot and move on if you can. You'll look less like a creep if you have photos of things other than just hot chicks' a**es.'
The images include unsuspecting women working out at the gym, waiting for the bus, standing in line at the grocery store and riding escalators. All were taken by men who simply saw them on the street and thought the subject was attractive.
The women are usually wearing nothing more revealing than jeans, t-shirts or yoga pants.
The response to the 'creep shots' forum - known as a subreddit - has been outrage and a campaign to remove the site has sprung up from other corners of Reddit, a diverse social networking site that boasts 35million users a month.
'What's particularly disturbing about the voyeur subreddits is that individuals are having their perverse, invasive, and illegal behavior validated and encouraged by many others,' wrote a furious Reddit user.
'Students should be able to attend class without having their privacy violated by fellow students and trusted authority figures like teachers. Girls should be able to go to school without worrying that sexually suggestive images of them are being uploaded to popular websites like Reddit for thousands to view and ogle.'
This isn't the first time perverted Reddit users have caused controversy. Another subreddit dedicated to posting sexually-suggestive photos of minors was banned after it created a media firestorm.
Critics said it became a launch pad for pedophiles to meet and swap child pornography.Now the focus has turned to r/CreepShots.
The culture blog Jezebel picked on the forum after internal watchdogs pointed out that at least one user was posting photos of teenage girls that appeared to be in a high school classroom.
The user admitted to being a teacher while posting photo albums like 'Hot Senior Girl in One of My Classes'.He also commented, 'You are sexy as f***... it's not even fair to the other girls at school how good looking you are.'
Those posts have since been taken down and his comments deleted.Another user, who was still posting new photos on Sunday, appears to be a high school student. Many of his images are of the buttocks of girls carrying backpacks.
Another image shows an up-the-skirt shot of a girl in a cheerleader uniform who is standing with her back to the camera.
In a disturbing post, he admitted that his sexually-suggestive images feature underage subjects, but defended posting them.
'I'm willing to wager that at least 40% of the all-time top posts contain women who aren't 18 years old.. if we got rid of that, a large majority of the subscribers wouldn't be too happy of that. My pictures are constantly praised and upvoted, even though all of the girls in them are younger than 17,' the user says.
