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| "Big Brother" might not be taping everything yet--although he may be monitoring all Internet use, but a bunch of “little brothers” are recording things that you might take for granted as being private. Videotape (or digital imaging)—somehow captures nearly every event today. An earthquake shakes a bridge--someone is on that bridge with a video camera. Police beat a suspect--someone has it on tape. A woman, working alone after work in a copy room decides to photocopy her breasts for her boyfriend as a lark. The next day her boss, who has the whole event on videotape from a tiny spy camera hidden in the perforated drop ceiling, decides to fire her. The videotape ends up on the Maury Povich TV show. A family suspects a baby-sitter is hitting their baby--and sets up a hidden "nannycam" and catches her in the act--and it ends up on TV. | | One news case featured a man who told a young female employee that she could “hang out” in his music store after work with her friends if she wanted to. He gave her the keys to the store. She ended up hanging out there, as many teens might like to do with such a tempting offer, and she, not surprisingly, “made out” with her boyfriend there. Later, the girl learned, he had hidden cameras to record whatever action might occur. | | Even in the early 1980s, when video cameras were large and expensive, there was a news case where a man in a boy's school in New Zealand videotaped his caning session with adolescent boys. He apparently beat adolescent boys about a dozen times or more every single week with a cane. | | For those who don’t know what I’m talking about here a beating “cane,” used formerly in British schools and currently in some British colonies, in British S/M erotica, and even here in the US in a few homes and institutions, is a “switch” made of Rattan or Bamboo generally. It is about 3-4 feet long, and perhaps 3/8 -1/2 inch thick (or somewhere in the neighborhood of a meter long and 8-15mm or so thick for the Metric minded folks). It often has a hook on the end like a walking cane would have — either as a "convient hook to hang it up with, as one man suggested, and/or to make sure the cane does not slip out of the hitter’s hand and go flying. (In this sense, American beating paddles often have an expanded handle end also.) | | The butt - caning man decided to run "a video experiment," allegedly to find out why his cane sometimes struck the adolescent boys a bit too low and hit their thighs. The headmaster told the press later, when it all blew up, that his reason for videotaping the caning sessions was that he was a very athletic and a powerful man. He wondered why his hits were “out of control” — why he didn’t hit exactly where he was aiming every time. He videotaped dozens of canings of boy's butts for several weeks with the large video camera openly visible on a large tripod. Eventually some parents found out. His caning videotape sessions caused an uproar. Half the parents, unbelievably to me, still supported this guy. The other half were really upset. Eventually he retired, as he was at that age anyway, but his videotaping of “CP” sessions was merely an early volley in the school child/corporal punishment hidden camera issue — and that was with very limited technology that featured only bulky and obvious cameras. | | By the mid-late 1990s “spy cameras” became commercially available, but were still rare and expensive. "Regular" camcorders, however, were then small and very cheap. A Christian school had a number of high school girls come into the gym to "ride the horse"—raise their skirt and bend over the end of the school vault that gymnasts use--and get their buttocks strapped, with skirts up and on the panties. Two men watched and took notes about which way the girl's asses bounced, and whether the strap cut into their flesh, and which way their buttocks quivered, etc. They were supposedly doing a “study of corporal punishment.” A video camera on a tripod openly taped the event. Another Southern Christian school of a different sect that we heard of did essentially the same thing—again in the gym with several other adult men “hanging around.” These were just a few cases that Cathy and I heard about. They never made any court or news. | | In the late 1990s--2000+ video cameras became very common and very cheap. Every business can have them. $59, an amount of money an average school principal takes home for one or two hours of work, buys a spy camera that looks just like a pocket pager or ink pen. Reading between the lines my best guess is that more than half of school paddlings of adolescents, especially but not exclusively with female victims, are now secretly videotaped. There is no law against it, and there is no way to know for sure. |
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