Women urged to contact police over 'misogynistic' Manchester nightlife videos as clips surface from other cities
19 April 2024, 13:19
Women in parts of England are being asked to contact police after being covertly filmed on nights out for online videos that rack up millions of views, earning the creators hundreds of thousands of pounds.
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The videos, with titles like “Manchester Nightlife” have racked up millions of YouTube views and attacked floods of misogynistic hate.
Police are trying to catch the people responsible for the voyeuristic TikTok and Youtube videos that show women on nights out walking between bars and nightclubs.
Women have described how the feel unsafe after discovering footage of themselves online, which attract highly sexualised comments.
One woman, Meg, who was filmed in Deansgate in Manchester, told the BBC: ““I didn’t see him, I didn’t know I was being recorded. I can’t believe I’ve been targeted in that way. He looked at me and thought ‘yeah, I’ll video them’.”
The videos predominantly feature women wearing tight or revealing clothes on nights out. Other videos show women on nights out in big cities like London, Leeds and Manchester.
Greater Manchester police (GMP) said women had reported seeing a man wearing Ray-Ban-style glasses with a hidden camera inside.
Filming on the street in public is not illegal however it can become so if the act constitutes harassment.
Ch Insp Stephen Wiggins said GMP needed women to come forward in order to catch the perpetrator. He said: “We are very much up against it if we don’t get that intelligence, that information, coming from the actual victims and communities themselves.
“We have intervened recently on a number of occasions where we had males acting suspiciously in the city centre. So our plea from our organisation is that people ring us if they see any suspicious behaviour in the city centre.”
TikTok and YouTube said they had removed a number of videos and accounts relating to this content for violating their guidelines.
A TikTok spokesperson said: “Misogyny is prohibited on TikTok. Any content found to violate these guidelines will be removed.”
More videos however surface every day on online platforms including TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
