NRW to call on federal government to ban voyeuristic images

North Rhine-Westphalia will call on the federal government to criminalise “voyueristic photography”, after one particular case in Cologne garnered attention online.

Cologne jogger creates petition against voyeuristic photos

In February 2025, Yanni Gentsch, a 30-year-old woman from Cologne, caught a stranger filming her bum while she was running in the park. She began filming a video, approached the man and demanded that he delete the video of her bum. 

When Gentsch went to the police to file a complaint, she found out that taking sexualised, voyueristic photographs of unconsenting strangers is not illegal in Germany. Gentsch uploaded the video she took of her interaction with the man, which has now been viewed by 16,4 million people.

The copywriter then created a petition calling on the government to criminalise unconsensual voyueristic photography, gathering almost 120.000 signatures. Gentsch’s petition was handed over to the North Rhine-Westphalia Justice Minister Benjamin Limbach (Greens) on Monday. 

Limbach announced he would bring the petition as an initiative at the next conference of state and federal justice ministers, with the goal of establishing nationwide legislation for the prosecution of unconsensual, sexually motivated image recordings.

“I am very thankful to Yanni Gentsch for making her case public and igniting a necessary debate around legal policy,” the minister said at a press conference.

Park man told Gentsch to wear different trousers or expect harassment

Making her appeal to prospective petition signers, Gentsch highlighted the fact that the man who filmed her had told her to wear different trousers or expect to be sexualised by strangers.

“I confronted the perpetrator. His answer? “Then why are you wearing trousers like that?” [...] I am not responsible for his misconduct [and] my clothes are not an invitation,” wrote Gentsch.

In an interview on the ndr show deep und deutlich, Gentsch also pointed out that although many passersby can be seen in her video, nobody stopped to help her. “If someone had stopped, a man or a woman, but mainly a man, they wouldn’t even have had to have said anything, even if they just stood there and looked stupid and observed, in the best case scenario, observed the man, [it would have helped].”

Speaking at the press conference with Limbach, Gentsch stressed that her experience was part of daily life for many women. “My case showed that a woman can experience harassment, and despite this, in the end, it is so often the case that there are no legal grounds to help her. [...] This is not just about my case, it is about a gap in legislation.”