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?
I am a little late in finding this post, but 2 hours after I became a new resident of SL I went to see one of the sims, a huge desert setting of an ancient alien civilization. No one else was there. About 20 minutes after being there I suddenly had two av’s standing one foot away from me, a guy and a girl. The guy had voice chat and was commenting on my butt, saying how good in bed he was…it really freaked me out. I walked away as fast as I could and they followed. The girl (if it was a girl) said "oh how fun, follow the leader". I finally realized I could teleport out (my second teleport ever). It shook me. I didn’t even know about the abuse button. It was attempted mental rape. They were getting their jollies from sexually harassing someone who was clearly new to SL, and the fact there were two of them made it even more scary. I will never forget it. I am not damaged by it because I am old enough to chalk it up to an experience, but it was unforgiveable behavior. Those PEOPLE knew what they were doing, and did it with ‘evil’ intentions. They set out to screw some poor stranger up. I have a lot of come backs ready now in case it happens again, none of which I can write in a PG environment.
But my point is that it really isn’t ok for people to act like that in real life or fake life. They are effecting the lives of others. Some wouldn’t be able to handle it mentally as well as I did. In some circumstances I think it should be a crime.
Seraphina, thanks for sharing your experience. It should be a crime. Actually it is. If we consider virtual rape a verbal assault with sexual connotations, and that’s the least it should be in front of the court of law, it is a crime. Problem is that it’s hard to get offenders to the court. Sure much bigger problem is that those things happen, that there are pathetic souls that actually find their fun in that.
Sounds like both jurisdiction and education in our civilization are completely screwed up.
Yes or we have the people who pretend to be you and RP the rape and then take pictures and pass them around with your name on them so that people in the varous clubs or in the stores start calling you a slut or a whore. After many months of this one person told me the source of the grief.
It was my ex who made an avatar using the skin, hair and shape that he knew that I wore and this avatar became one RP sims little rape doll.
Personally LL should I.D. everyone in the FF sims then pass on their chat logs to the RL police or other goverment agency then create a profile and should a rape that matches a certain M.O. in RL pull up that persons RL name and go question them.
Another good tool would be to include these rape roleplays into background checks involving jobs with children or other people who are easy to victimize.
For the first case… you have a sick ex-boyfriend. If you were together iRL he’d probably upload your naked pics on smut sites. But that is not a rape, that is exploatation of pixels that look like you for his immature fun.
But, ID’ing everyone and passing chatlogs to the police sounds too close to fascism for me to swallow. What do you want? Some virtual world Gestapo monitoring people, making dossiers, questioning them… that sounds too much police state, isn’t it?