CANADA: The 15-year-old wore her school uniform, unaware a stranger followed as she walked with her mother and brother through Victoria’s Mayfair Shopping Centre. A cellphone video would later show a voyeur trailing the family, before getting close enough to slip a camera beneath the girl’s pleated skirt.
When police told the girl’s mother, she faced a dilemma: tell her daughter, or keep it to herself?
“Learning my daughter’s image had been taken and posted on child pornography websites was devastating,” she wrote in a victim impact statement read in court earlier this year.
“I have carried significant stress over how I want to tell her and how she will cope with the information once she learns the truth.” The teen is one of 652 women and children filmed in what officials claim is the largest case of voyeurism ever reported in Canada.
Yin Yeung Derek Chan spent six years secretly recording victims throughout communities on southern Vancouver Island, filming through house windows and prowling malls and well-known stores in the heart of downtown Victoria.
In the year prior to Chan’s 2024 arrest, the voyeur was creating more than a video a day, uploading footage and photos of victims to social media, porn sites and a personal website that had over a million views before it was taken down.
Chan was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison in May — but many of the photos and videos remain online. Only a fraction of the victims have been identified.
Despite wide reporting of the sentencing, many questions remain about the police investigation and the impact of Chan’s crimes. This news agency has spent months gathering court records, listening to audio of courtroom proceedings and reaching out to Chan’s victims. In her victim impact statement, one woman said watching the video Chan took of her “shattered” her sense of safety. “Seeing myself through the eyes of someone who had been hiding, watching, deliberately capturing me without my knowledge or consent — it made me feel hunted,” she said.