WhatsApp “sex pest” arrested in South Africa
Police have arrested a 35-year-old man from Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) for allegedly harassing women with sexually explicit videos over WhatsApp since 2013.
Rapport reports the man admitted to the offences during his arrest on Thursday.
The suspect had made sexually explicit video calls to numerous women, including real estate agents and car dealership employees who had their phone numbers publicly available.
When they answered his calls, the suspect would film himself masturbating.
Potchefstroom private investigator, Johan Botes, who worked with the police to track down the perpetrator, said he had taken statements from 25 of the suspect’s victims over the last few months and expected there were more.
In some instances, the unsuspecting children of the victims had answered calls on their parents’ phones and seen the videos.
Botes said the suspect had used SIM cards that were not RICA’d, allowing him to avoid identification by the authorities.
The suspect will appear in court on Monday to face charges of indecent exposure and crimen injuria.
South Africa has several laws that specifically cover the sharing of sexually explicit imagery.
However, these are focused primarily on instances where a victim may have had their privacy or dignity infringed due to a perpetrator sharing a sexually explicit image of them without their consent.
The Films and Publications Amendment Act 11 of 2019 already includes legislation that made it a crime to share certain “intimate images”.
These include the depiction of a person:
- either real or simulated (i.e. can be a cartoon or a drawing);
- made by any means (i.e. painted, captured on film, made electronically, etc.);
- in which such a person is nude, or the genital organs of the person is displayed (and this includes if such genital organs are covered);
- if the person displayed retains a reasonable expectation of privacy at the time that the message was created or sent;
- which violates the sexual integrity or dignity of the person;
- or amounts to sexual exploitation.
The Cybercrimes Act, which was signed into law this year, included further provisions on the unlawful sharing of such images without the permission of the person in the images.
This legislation does not discuss sending sexually explicit images of oneself to others without their consent either, however.
Instead, cases like the one involving the Gqeberha man are typically treated as indecent exposure and could also amount to crimen injuria under South Africa’s common law.
The latter is defined as the wilful injury to someone’s dignity caused by the use of obscene gestures (or in other instances, racial slurs).
Punishment for indecent exposure includes a fine of R4,000 or imprisonment for up to two years or both, while crimen injuria could carry a fine and a suspended sentence for first-time offenders.
Both of these crimes can be committed through digital communication channels like WhatsApp or other social media platforms.
WhatsApp also lets users report numbers that are harassing them, but since its video calls are end-to-end encrypted, there should be no way for the company to check the contents of the call to confirm the reporter’s version of events.
However, the platform does allow users to report a chat and let a WhatsApp moderator see the last five messages of a conversation to decide whether it violated its terms of service.
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