There is a lot of noise lately about rape and other sex related violence in virtual worlds provoked by Regina Lynn's article Virtual Rape Is Traumatic, But Is It a Crime? This post is a comment on the subject originally written at Second Tense.
Rape inside the virtual worlds came to my attention a month or so ago by two unrelated occasions. First was a post on some feminist's site which attacked the possibility of role-playing the rape scene in second life. Other one was what can be called an attempt of rape of myself. These two combined led to a little investigation of mine which resulted in Many Ways To Rape. No doubt there is a difference between the two. I am always to defend the freedom of role-playing and freedom of doing whatever in which all the participants are agreed upon. As we all know, second life provides an efficient way of agreeing upon the scene and animations that two or more avatars will get into. One either click the ball and give permissions or not. If two adults want to play rape it is fine, wish them fun and let them go.
Completely other situation is if there is no consent of both sides. In that case, there can be no animation and the far that rapist can go is to wear its genital attachment, talk sexual offenses and push victim's avatar across the room. Is that enough to call it a rape? Or an attempt of rape?
Many arguments that came out during the last few days of commenting Regina's article hold the opinion that identifying such an activity with real-life rape is way too much. And I agree with that. Damage and impact on victim is unmeasurably higher in real-life.
But that doesn't mean that everything is clear in virtual world. It is what we call griefing. And it is also sexual harassment. If one attach a plastic genitals to his pants, start talking sexual offenses and run upon some woman's body in real life it would be declared at least as sexual harassment. And it is sexual harassment in virtual world just the same. And that has an impact on the victim. I find myself reasonably (huh! the question is what that is supposed to mean) attached to my avatar, and not too sensible, but when it happened to me I found it very disturbing.
Another type of comments we heard a lot was that victim just have to teleport or logg out end everything will be fine. True, one can easily escape. Everything will be fine after that? Well, no. Not really. The damage is done already. At the moment victim is ready to teleport away everything that griefer can do is already done. And are we supposed to run away from every griefer? What will our world turn into then?
Now we come to the question of Belgium police coming to second life to deal with sexual harassment a.k.a virtual rape. That question is rather complex one as explained in Flow My Tears. But, the part interesting here is:
Is police capable and authorized to do anything about someone who is without payment info, and whose crime is verbal? To get things straight: griefing in the form of virtual rape is misbehaving which we need to be protected of. But it is still verbal delict. That is, it is hard to prove. Now, have in mind that there is real life police of one country trying to work in the metaverse, to get the offender from whichever country and to do what? To cage him?
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