‘My friend just sent me this video, told me she’d found me in it,” read the text. “As I was looking for myself, I noticed you’re in it too. I didn’t know I was being filmed, guess you don’t either, just wanted to let you know …”
When Nancy Naylor Hayes received the message in November 2023, she felt a twinge of fear. It was from an acquaintance she hadn’t heard from in years. “I was panicking,” she says. The text pointed her to a Facebook link, which led to a montage of clips of women filmed on the streets of Manchester during nights out.
“You don’t know what you might have been caught doing,” she says. “What if they’ve got a horrible video of me?” She saw herself a few minutes in, with a friend she had been with that night as they visited the city’s bars. Clearly oblivious to the camera filming her, she stands on a pavement outside a doorway on her phone – calling a taxi, she recalls – her hand on the hip of her khaki miniskirt. Then the film-maker zooms in on her face and lingers there before recording her reaching across to wipe something from her friend’s cheek.
The 25-year-old from Wigan, who works as a progression coach for young people facing homelessness, still finds herself struggling to describe how the video made her feel. After all, she was “just literally stood having a conversation”. Yet she felt embarrassed. That intrusive lens “completely violates all privacy”, she says. “Surely that’s not allowed?” she texted back.
In fact, videos of this nature, termed “nightlife content” or “walking tour content” and filmed covertly in public areas, tend to fall into a legal grey area with nothing prohibiting them. It is not illegal to film in a public area unless a reasonable expectation of privacy is being breached, a private or intimate act is being captured or the filmer’s behaviour counts as harassment. But a recent BBC investigation found more than 65 online channels with nightlife content videos, which had collectively been watched more than 3bn times over the past three years.
The creators of these channels, most of whom are anonymous, sometimes travel internationally specifically to film nightlife scenes. In the UK, Manchester and London are heavily targeted. The focus is almost solely young women, usually walking between bars and clubs. There is no structure or narrative, yet the films each generate hundreds of thousands – even millions – of views, earning profit for creators and social media platforms.
Women stride unknowingly towards the camera, which is often held at a low angle and apparently obscured. They are sometimes holding hands, sometimes staggering in heels. The camera operator will often home in on the tugging down of a miniskirt, the rearranging of a strapless top. Sometimes women are perching on a kerb, the camera hovering low as they manoeuvre their legs. Sometimes they munch chips or even fall over. Often the camera lingers on a woman’s cleavage as she walks closer, or focuses in from behind on her hot pants. These are creepshots in motion, but they rarely reveal anything not seen publicly. Awkward moments, too, are slyly captured: women arguing, a woman bending forwards, being sick.
Naylor Hayes soon realised there were two versions of the footage in which she featured. There was the montage on Facebook and another on YouTube, showing just her face. “It just made me feel so uncomfortable, because somebody’s seen that, clipped it down, zoomed in,” she says. “What if they have saved it? Who have they shared it with?” Then there were the comments. Hundreds of them. “Sexual things, things about my body,” she says, haltingly. “They were comparing me to … have you heard of Bonnie Blue?” she asks, quietly. Bonnie Blue is the moniker of the adult content maker Tia Billinger. There were humiliating remarks. “Saying I was fat, that I needed to not eat.”
Naylor Hayes’ acquaintance told her she had reported the video to Facebook, yet it had remained online. Naylor Hayes tried asking the creator of the YouTube clip to take it down, but received no reply. She also commented on the video, to a mixed response: some agreed the video was “strange”; others insisted “they’re not doing anything illegal”. She did not approach YouTube directly, but did call the non-emergency police line, 101. “It was a really short, blunt conversation,” she says. “They just said they’re not breaking any laws … it’s a public space, they’re allowed to do that.” Greater Manchester police stress that they always respond and investigate when a criminal threshold is reached.
When we first speak, Naylor Hayes is confident that the videos are no longer online, as she hasn’t seen or been shown any in some time and old links are no longer active. But I later spot her on YouTube in a video titled Manchester City UK Party Nightlife. It has attracted 1.5m views since publication two years ago. “Scary,” she says when I show her. “It’s just not a nice feeling; it’s uncomfortable. It’s a strange thought that many people have seen me without me even realising.”
The YouTube account that uploaded the video is called City Life; it has 105,000 subscribers and another 14 similar videos with nearly 20m views in total. The most watched has 5.7 million views. The montage Naylor Hayes appears in has 846 comments. They range from sexual to mocking and are often vitriolic. “The weekly future single mothers of Manchester meeting, lol,” reads one. “Is this a red light district?” asks another. “So many fat women.” “A target-rich environment.” “They look so easy!” City Life’s profile reads: “I make high-quality videos about nightlife and popular places to visit in London and beyond.”
Naylor Hayes assumes asking YouTube to remove it would be fruitless. She sounds despondent. “I just don’t think it would be successful,” she says. Responding to an initial request for comment on nightlife content, YouTube said: “Hate and harassment are not allowed on YouTube and we have clear policies that prohibit targeting an individual with threats or prolonged and malicious insults based on attributes like their sex or gender. We also prohibit content that contains unwanted sexualisation of an identifiable individual.” It said anyone can request removal of content that features them and that it removed the City Life account after being contacted by the Guardian: “After review, we terminated the channel and removed the flagged video for violating our terms of service, which prohibits terminated users from using or creating any other YouTube channels.”
Facebook said the removal of the video reported by Naylor Hayes’ acquaintance was “likely as a result of action taken by our systems”. It referred to its rules that prohibit videos that focus on a person’s commonly sexualised body parts, particularly when the intent is to mock, sexualise or reveal the identity of the person depicted, including imagery filmed covertly. TikTok said it prohibits non-consensual sexual imagery, removing videos and banning accounts that breach the rules, adding that its community guidelines clarify that hateful behaviour, including misogyny, is not tolerated.
Yet nightlife videos remain prolific. Prof Annabelle Gawer, the director of the Centre of Digital Economy at the University of Surrey, says content of this kind can “generate anything from a few pounds to tens of thousands of pounds per month” depending on views, adverts, watch time and other factors. Uploading content across multiple platforms can multiply earnings. She studies the data on Naylor Hayes’ video. “A reasonable range for ad revenue alone from that single video is roughly $1,500 [£1,130] to $4,500 over its lifetime so far,” she estimates. Its large subscriber base adds more earning potential through channel memberships and conversions to off-platform links. She estimates that “YouTube’s gross would be of a similar order of magnitude”, adding that: “The woman filmed without her consent sees none of that.”
Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University and a specialist in violence against women and girls, sounds frustrated. “It’s not unlawful to video out in public, walking down a busy street,” she says. “And in many ways we don’t want that to be unlawful, because many of us might be doing that quite legitimately and people happen to be in the background.” A reasonable expectation of privacy might apply in an intimate space such as a public toilet; voyeurism would apply only to an act deemed private, observed or recorded without consent, for sexual gratification or to cause distress.
There might be a legal case if footage fell under the definition of intimate or sexual, but most within these videos would not, says McGlynn. She worked on the building blocks behind the the upskirting offence, introduced in 2019, which typically relates to the taking of a picture under a person’s clothing without them knowing, where the purpose is to obtain sexual gratification or to cause humiliation, distress or alarm. But while some of the women in the videos might be able to claim this, she cannot highlight one in footage she has seen. The videos do not generally “cross the threshold” for harassment, either. “If you filmed one person and uploaded one video, that wouldn’t be harassment, because it’s not a course of conduct.”
In November 2024, Greater Manchester police arrested a Bradford man on suspicion of voyeurism and harassment in connection with several reports of women being followed, filmed and harassed in Manchester city centre. It is believed to be the first arrest of its kind in relation to nightlife content. However, in January this year, the force revealed the criminal investigation had “concluded due to limitations within the current legislation” and they are now “exploring other routes of taking action alongside Manchester city council”. The National Police Chiefs’ Council said it recognised that the videos can leave women feeling “objectified and powerless” and encourages anyone who feels unsafe to contact the police. “We would also urge those filming in public spaces to consider the impact their actions might have on those being filmed without their consent,” a spokesperson said.
The Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhouse, who also worked on the private member’s bill that led to the upskirting offence, is campaigning to criminalise nightlife content. She finds the videos “deeply disturbing”. “Women are simply going about their lives, only to discover they have been turned into sexualised content without their knowledge or consent,” she says. “I see this as an extension of the work I did to make upskirting illegal. In both cases, the law has failed to keep pace with new forms of technology-facilitated harassment and abuse.”
Her images (non-consensual recording and distribution) private member’s bill proposes “creating offences relating to the non-consensual recording of images of a person and the online distribution of such images for profit with the purpose of obtaining sexual gratification or of causing humiliation or distress to that person”. A second reading is pending.
Amy Adams, a model and influencer, has posted on TikTok about the psychological impact of appearing in two nightlife videos. “It’s so creepy,” she says. “These videos get loads of views … I think the whole premise of the account is so disgusting. He [calls it] nightlife in Manchester, but in reality it’s some guy recording young girls on a night out.” She finds the comments the hardest to deal with. “There’s loads of men in the comments saying: ‘With what they’re wearing, they’re asking for it,’ basically objectifying and sexualising the women in these videos … it’s creating this community of misogynistic men.” She adds: “I don’t want to be videoed on a night out when I’m just trying to have fun with my friends.”
On LinkedIn, another young woman describes the experience as “utterly terrifying”. She and her friends had no idea they were being filmed: “We only became aware weeks later when friends started tagging us in the video online … It’s deeply unsettling to realise how easily this can happen without consent or awareness – especially when you consider how much more vulnerable someone could be if they were alone or under the influence of alcohol,” she says. To Naylor Hayes’ mind, she might have been in a public space when filmed, but that moment was never meant to be seen by millions. She is now on guard when she goes out. “I don’t stand outside bars unless I know my Uber’s there,” she says.
Dr Louise Goddard-Crawley, a British Psychological Society chartered psychologist, says: “These videos tap into something we recognise in trauma work, which is the rupture of agency. Even in public space, we carry an implicit expectation that we remain subjects of our own story rather than objects to be captured and repurposed by someone else without consent. Trauma is not only about physical violation. It is about an experience that overwhelms our sense of safety and control.”
Meanwhile, the personal safety charity the Suzy Lamplugh Trust points to potential physical repercussions. “Content that singles out women for the purpose of facilitating misogynistic commentary online can contribute to a wider environment in which harassment and abuse are normalised,” said a spokesperson.
Gawer believes the swiftest recourse would be to demonetise this content. “Platforms already decide which videos can carry ads; they should simply treat voyeuristic ‘night walk’ footage as non-monetisable and non-recommendable, so secretly filming women stops being a viable business model,” she says. “If platforms stopped putting ads on these videos and stopped pushing them into recommendation feeds, a lot of that behaviour would dry up very quickly.”
Naylor Hayes agrees there needs to be “some type of protection”. Mostly, though, she still sounds stunned that she could have been filmed, viewed by millions and monetised simply because she stood on a pavement to call a cab. “It just feels so creepy.”
• In the UK, the National Stalking Helpline is on 0808 802 0300 or email via their inquiry form. In the US, resources are available at stalkingawareness.org
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