Campaigners have issued fresh calls for the government to make “upskirting” a criminal sexual offence, saying that current laws around the issue do not provide women with sufficient protection or privacy.

The renewed attention on upskirting comes after the Press Association made a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to police forces in England and Wales. The request found that police had pursued 78 offences related to upskirting since 2015, most involving alleged offences against young women and girls.

Of these 75 alleged offences, only 11 people were charged. Many cases had to be dropped due to a lack of evidence – including one involving an alleged offence on a 10-year-old girl in the West Country. In addition, only 15 out of 44 police forces held records on offences related to upskirting at all.

Currently, the practice of secretly taking a photograph under a woman’s skirt is a crime in Scotland, but is not illegal in England and Wales. Those caught in the act could theoretically be charged with other offences, namely voyeurism or indecency, but it is feared that this means that some perpetrators are not charged at all.

Campaigners have long been pushing for upskirting to be criminalised, much in the same way that revenge porn has been made a standalone offence, to make it easier to bring charges against alleged offenders.

Sarah Green, of the End Violence Against Women coalition, told BBC News that the polices responses revealed by the FoI request “show that the police are clearly struggling to recognise upskirting distinctly, even though the disclosures reveal that it is commonly connected to existing sexual offences including voyeurism and sexual assault”.

Of course ‘upskirting’ should be made a crime