Supreme Court finds teacher who used camera pen guilty of voyeurism

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled Thursday that a high school teacher who secretly recorded his female students’ chests with a camera hidden in a pen committed voyeurism.

Ryan Jarvis, an English teacher from London, Ontario, was arrested after police learned that he had made recordings of conversations he had with 27 female students between January 2010 and June 2011.

The first judge who heard the case, acquitted Jarvis on the grounds that while he had violated the students’ privacy by secretly recording their chests and cleavage, there was no clear sexual intent in the recordings.

The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that Jarvis did act with sexual intent, but still upheld his acquittal, arguing the students had no reasonable expectation of privacy at school, given that security cameras were present in all of the locations that the recordings with the spy pen were made.

In a unanimous decision Canada’s highest court said “a person would continue to expect some degree of privacy, as that concept is ordinarily understood, while knowing that she could be viewed or even recorded by others in a public place.”

Writing for the bench, Chief Justice Richard Wagner said privacy is the “concept of freedom from unwanted scrutiny, intrusion or attention.”

“The use of a cell phone to capture upskirt images of women on public transit, the use of a drone to take high-resolution photographs of unsuspecting sunbathers at a public swimming pool, and the surreptitious video recording of a woman breastfeeding in a quiet corner of a coffee shop would all raise similar privacy concerns,” his decision noted.

Jarvis will be sentenced at a later date and could face a sentence of up to five years in prison.

The Ontario College of Teachers will also hold disciplinary hearings into his conduct for alleged offences including sexual abuse of students, psychological or emotional abuse and unprofessional conduct.

With files from CBC News