Structural analysis of educator voyeurism: A comparative study of offending patterns across school levels using text mining (1985–2024)

Educator voyeurism is rapidly emerging as a form of Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence. However, official statistics often black-box the Modus Operandi (M.O.), leaving the structural mechanisms of these crimes poorly understood. This study aims to uncover how the physical environments and management systems of different school levels interact with technological affordances to create distinct crime opportunities. We conducted a quantitative text mining (co-occurrence network) analysis of 884 newspaper reports detailing educator voyeurism in Japan over a 40-year period. The results revealed fundamentally different M.O. structures based on school type. Junior and senior high school teachers primarily engaged in sudden “opportunity crimes” targeting unfamiliar adult women in off-campus public spaces, facilitated by smartphone anonymity and the high mobility inherent in the subject-teacher system. Conversely, elementary school teachers exhibited a severe fixation on their own students within closed classrooms. Exploiting the absolute spatial dominance granted by the homeroom teacher system, these offenders intentionally transformed classrooms into unmonitored “hunting grounds,” objectively validating the self-selection hypothesis. This structural vulnerability was recently reflected in a large-scale organized voyeurism network uncovered in 2025. The findings bridge theoretical criminology and practical application by demonstrating that reliance on individual ethics training alone may be insufficient. Instead, safeguarding educational environments requires urgent interventions rooted in Situational Crime Prevention, focusing on the environmental redesign of hardware and systems—such as eliminating blind spots and implementing multiple-teacher systems—to physically neutralize offenders’ intentions.