Filming up skirts and down blouses are stand-alone crimes in …

A poster from a PSNI awareness campaign about the new offences (Photo: /) The changes to the law create stand-alone offences of "up-skirting" and "down-blousing" - in other words, taking a picture up a woman's skirt, or down their top. A new offence of "sending an unwanted sexual image" will target those who send an images their genitals to another person without their consent (commonly known as "cyber-flashing").

All of these offences could land the perpetrator up to two years in prison and in the most serious of cases, 10 years on the sex offender register. They represent the last bits of the Justice (Sexual Offences and Trafficking Victims) Act (Northern Ireland) 2022 to come into operation. In recent years there has been a huge push by feminist activists to prioritise crimes against women, and to alter how the judicial system handles complaints of sexual offences.

This is partly tied to the unanimous acquittal in March 2018 of Stuart Olding and Paddy Jackson over an allegation of rape from June 2016. Their trial kicked off a wide-ranging review of the judicial process led by retired judge John Gillen. Among his resulting recommendations were:

That the public should be barred from trials; Courts should move towards pre-recording cross-examinations of complainants so they are not quizzed live in court; And measures should be taken at the outset of trials "to combat rape myths", such as instructions to the jury.

Among the things he says are "myths" is the idea that false allegations are common. At the same time, the term "domestic violence" has been largely ditched and replaced by the much more far-ranging offence of "domestic abuse". As part of this cultural shift the PSNI has advised people to file police reports if you "worry about upsetting your partner" or if you "sometimes get the 'silent treatment'".

Meanwhile the PSNI last year embarked upon a mass re-examination of complaints of "sexual impropriety" against its own officers, staffed by a seven-strong full-time team of detectives and looking back as far as a decade.

Detective Superintendent Lindsay Fisher said of the new laws today: "This legislation will go a long way to help address the prevailing sexist attitudes and behaviours in our society that underpin violence, abuse and intimidation against women and girls."

The PSNI also issued a comment from Sarah Mason, CEO of the Women's Aid Federation, in which she said: "We must focus on the behaviour and attitudes of perpetrators of violence in order to dismantle them if we are going to have a society where health respectful [sic] behaviours are the norm."