“A teenage girl has fled her home after a pervert who drilled holes in her bedroom ceiling to spy on her was freed from jail — to move back next door. Loner Micky Smith, 47, removed bricks from an attic wall between their adjoining semis so he could crawl into the loft above 16-year-old Kayleigh White’s bed. Now he has been released early from a six-month sentence — and horrified Kayleigh has been forced to go and live with her gran. Kayleigh, now 17, said: ‘The sight of him makes my flesh crawl.’ The schoolgirl first realised he was leering at her when plaster dust fell on her in bed in May last year. She looked up and saw a drill bit. She said: ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. I can only imagine he did it for some sexual purpose. I’d heard noises above for about 20 minutes.’ After her family reported him, he spat at them in the street and daubed ‘ha ha’ and a smiley on a shared gate at Blackheath, West Midlands. Single dad Smith — who had also trained a CCTV camera on Kayleigh’s window — banged on walls and yelled out the song You’ve Got A Friend, changing the words to ‘You’re going to get it’… Since his release, Smith has painted a grinning face in his back yard — pointing up at Kayleigh’s window.” — The Sun (UK)

Unfortunately for the victim, not only did she receive unwanted attention from her creepy neighbor, she now has her picture plastered beside his in British tabloids. A picture of her house and even her bedroom — with holes in the ceiling — is featured in The Sun. It is as though the press comes to complete an invasion of privacy that her voyeuristic neighbor initiated. To the perp’s voyeurism is now added the lower-intensity voyeurism of every newspaper reader who sees her pictures and asks himself, “Would I crawl through an attic and risk arrest for a glimpse of this girl in her nightgown?”

Clearly the perp thought she was worth it. He’s not the least bit repentant. The grinning face he’s painted in his backyard — which stares up at the girl’s window — vaunts his own voyeurism. Probably the girl and her family are right to worry about this guy. It’s astonishing that such an unrepentant perp has been allowed to return to the very scene of his crime. The girl’s mother has managed to schedule a hearing in the hopes of getting him evicted, but bureaucracy is bureacracy. It’s not so simple to eject a person from his property, even if its proximity to his victim practically prolongs his original crime.

What can they do? To move away further victimizes the entire family. To remain next to the creep leaves them vulnerable to further violence. To have the guy forcibly evicted may work but will take time — and it may well trigger some sort of retaliation. It’s tempting to think that perhaps the girl and her family should turn the tables on the guy — set up cameras monitoring him, for example — but given his aggressiveness, he’d probably escalate the battle in some unfortunate way. Maybe this is one case where it really is just as well to turn the other cheek — and run.

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