Writes Helen Rumbelow "Young, female and vulnerable: a ‘rape’ in the virtual world/As police investigate the sexual assault of a girl’s VR avatar, Helen Rumbelow puts on a headset and ventures into the metaverse" (London Times).
When I go on Horizon Worlds... I first give myself a female avatar called Nicky, with blonde hair and a red dress, and play a few different games in groups of virtual strangers. The vibe is quite “cruisey”: I can follow and message anyone I am hanging out with and I keep having to interrupt play to dismiss requests to privately connect. It’s like trying to play tennis with a bunch of men rushing on court to get my number.
In some ways, though, things feel more equal. In VR, you can hear everyone’s real voice. This means that there are far more clues to identity than in most online forums. When I start talking in a game called “Bad Room-mates”, the British teenage boys playing squeal with laughter. “Wait, are you my mum?” one says....
[A]t one point in a haunted house game called Bonnie’s Revenge I am briefly surrounded by a bunch of unknown guys in a dark corridor. In real life this would be a heart-rate moment; instead I blast straight past them. I am repeatedly reminded that I have the mute button to turn off any characters that offend me. But then what would I miss of what they were saying and doing?
Rumbelow also tries taking on a male identity in Horizon Worlds, and other male avatars call on hers to gang up on the one female avatar. They say things like “Yes, let’s kill the girl!” and “Let’s shoot her in the head!” But it seems to be within a game where the female is also attacking them. There are a lot of video games where people go about murdering each other. Rumbelow strayed away from the original question: rape. Is virtual rape morally — legally?! — different from virtual murder?
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46 comments:
More evidence that we are F'd as a society and possibly a species.
Pretty sure that "raping" a 16-year old's avatar counts as creating sexual content online and transmitting it to a minor.
Which I *think* is a crime.
"Does the fact that the girl’s attack happened virtually mean it didn’t really happen at all?"
Yes.
This is not news. It's a rehash of the hand-wringing that followed Second Life 20 years ago. Second Life had lots of avatar fake sex, lots of role playing fiction, and lots of voice shifting (i.e., old men pretending to be young women).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life
See Bruce Willis Surrogates (2009) for a mainstream film of this concept and the spectrum of concerns.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/
Key points:
1. None of the participants know the true identities or ages of others in the environment.
2. Some environments are role-playing / acting / virtual stage plays (i.e., themed fiction).
3. Any 'victim' can instantly escape by removing the headset or leaving the environment.
4. Parents are responsible for managing a minor child's activities (e.g., issuing cell phones, having curfews, "grounding," checking for fake IDs to drink or get into clubs).
This is silly and where the hell are the girl's parents? Role playing in their VR headsets?
My biggest problem with this is UK law is explicit that rape occurs from penis penetration, which leaves out many other forms of what is considered rape in the US, such as the ability for a female to commit rape. So there should be no investigation of some “virtual rape” when it clearly doesn’t meet the legal definition.
As for the concept of being raped virtually, why does the 16 year stay logged in? Considering how bad the avatars in Meta are and that they don’t even have legs, two or three, so what is the virtual physical act anyway? Thinking about other virtual environments, are we now going to investigate mass murders and rape in Grand Theft Auto Online multiplayer environments? Or if you are playing GTA online, are you asking for it?
Considering in the UK, you can be arrested for making derogatory comments about immigrants that have committed rape; I’m sure there are other laws other than rape to defend this 16 year olds right to interact in the virtual world without fear of some form of assault.
As Whoopi Goldberg would say, "I know it wasn't rape-rape." That aside, of course it's not rape. It seems more akin to online harassment, which I have no idea at what point crosses over into being a crime. But I don't have the patience to delve into all the nuances of this virtual world that I'm pretty sure I will never experience.
"I am not a big fan of video games where you cannot kill a prostitute." (Norm)
It is 2024. It is already believed by many, and urgently pushed by the powers that be, that you can be a girl even if you don’t have a vagina. So if you can be a girl without a vagina in real life, it’s a short walk to having your virtual vagina violated in a game somewhere. Best of times.
Up next: Police will start arresting teens for carjacking when playing "Grand Theft Auto".
The crime of physical rape did not happen at all, of course. The possible crime of subjecting a minor to sexually explicit material appears to have happened. That this is the UK, further complicates the incident by adding the element of hysterical, overwrought government intrusiveness on sexual matters involving children that the public seems to be willing to accept like sheep, when it comes to taking action (or not) incorrectly, with jackbooted authority.
She couldn't just take the headset off?
This was a problem with the original MMOs. And I mean text-based MMOs.
Some guy would type out how he was sexually assaulting some targeted woman (who may have been a man for all we know). Some would have scripts that they’d execute for this.
What Duty of Inquiry said.
Weird that it has to be said.
Leland said...
As for the concept of being raped virtually, why does the 16 year stay logged in?
1/3/24, 7:22 AM
This!
It does NOT matter who you are, if you are in an uncomfortable situation on-line, un-plug.
This is idiotic. No attack took place. She was never prevented from leaving the game. It does seem likely that (just like ordinary video games, I believe) men will vastly outnumber women in this environment. Who cares? The sooner this crap is seen to be marginal stupidity the better.
The British governments don't seem particularly concerned about Actual Physical gang rapes..
WHY would they be concerned about this thing? OH! i see. The perps were white boys.. nuf said
I think I’m okay with avatars/virtual police investigating and arresting avatars for virtual rape and virtual courts sentencing guilty avatars to VR jail.
meanwhile, back in the real world..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
organised child sexual abuse that occurred in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, Northern England from the late 1980s until present and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period
The Jay inquiry estimated that there may be 1,400 victims. Although the inquiry did not specify the ethnicity of the victims or the perpetrators, the authors noted that in a large number of historic cases in particular, most of the victims they sampled were white British while the perpetrators were from ethnic minority communities.
The first 14 comments clearly cover the spectrum of reasonable responses to this article. If there was a crime committed there are already laws to address that and it obviously isn’t rape. Tech freaks have been hyping VR for so long I am bored hearing about it. There are huge limitations to widespread adoption very similar to the EV constraints of limited value versus the availability of easier to use options that give more bang for the buck.
There is a certain genre of “journalism” that thrives on trying to sell niche products to the general population, or pretends to reveal dangers to sympathetic victims. But it’s really easy to avoid the dangers by rejecting the niche technology altogether. If and when it matures and cost/benefit ratio makes it easier for people to test out then maybe it will be workable at scale and if unique problems are presented we can deal with it. None of that applies here.
I guess taking off the headset and making the decision to never play the game again was not an option? She should have just quit and gone outside to rake the leaves or maybe cleaned and re-organized her bedroom.
The UK police will be in a pickle if the rape gang turns out to be men of South Asian descent. They allowed real rape gangs to remain active for decades in Rotherham, so it would be awkward to bust rapists in VR world.
The boys should be tried before their Oculus peers in an Oculus courtroom. If found guilty, they should be confined in an Oculus jail for an appropriate length of time...I'm not sure how they pace time in the Oculus world, but the length should exceed fifteen minutes at least.
Did this girl have no arms and hands? Was the headset glued to her head?
George Orwell was British I believe.
Well we know British authorities looked the other way and actively declined to pursue thousands of cases of actual, physical rape and abuse (Rotherham, etc,) due to concerns they'd look racist for prosecuting or even interfering with crimes committed by immigrants and minorities, so one can only conclude that the VR attackers must have been white.
Tyler The Creator Tweet on Cyberbullying
People do not go online to act better than they do in the real world.
Is there a "duty to retreat" when being assaulted in a virtual environment when leaving simply requires turning off the app?
I think the virtual rapists should be virtually arrested, virtual tried, and virtually imprisoned for life...you know, the next time they turn on their virtual reality sets.
"[A]t one point in a haunted house game called Bonnie’s Revenge I am briefly surrounded by a bunch of unknown guys in a dark corridor. In real life this would be a heart-rate moment; instead I blast straight past them."
Surrounded = rape..in a game.
AI administered environment. Go green, divest from on-line.
That said, in the virtual world, it is advisable to carry "I'm rubber, you're glue" x infinity.
...where a British schoolgirl under the age of 16 was allegedly 'gang-raped' by a group of online strangers.
I didn't know Pakistanis were big into gaming...
But it's the future of England.
Better get used to it in the virtual world before it becomes reality.
In America, a teen girl was raped... rape-raped by an illegal alien, then traveled to a sanctuary city, where the "burden" of evidence was aborted and the carbon was sequestered in darkness.
But it's the future of England
South Africa is the rape capital of the world, Norway is competitive, and Gaza celebrates it with pride in parades.
Oh my gosh. I hope I’m never charged with murder for the thousands of gamers I killed while playing Call Of Duty.
Take off the glasses.
Guys will jump the asses, of gals in VR glasses.
What do we call this, which is clearly beyond even "First World Problem"?
The challenge for VR is its input to the senses. We all experience the world through sensory input. Therefore a violation in the VR world may be indistinguishable from one in the real world at some point in VR development. Arguments that things happen at a distance will no longer be a defense. It will be strange and weird and legally thorny.
I'm sorry. If you can take off your headset and turn off the console whenever you want, you are not being raped.
If you don't like the movie, change the channel.
This is an old problem wearing new more expensive clothes.
See Bruce Willis Surrogates (2009) for a mainstream film of this concept and the spectrum of concerns.
An underrated film. And a peek into our future.
“Is virtual rape morally — legally?! — different from virtual murder?”
Certainly not. So everyone who has ever killed someone in GTA must be tracked down and punished.
Digital Hate is a premise of the next for-profit non-profit leverage scheme.
@Ron Nelson: The challenge for VR is its input to the senses. We all experience the world through sensory input. Therefore a violation in the VR world may be indistinguishable from one in the real world at some point in VR development. Arguments that things happen at a distance will no longer be a defense. It will be strange and weird and legally thorny.
Uhhhh, no. Not at all. Rape involves penises, vaginas, semen, viruses, bacteria, risks of pregnancy, and often physical injury. Voluntarily putting on VR goggles allows one to see dry electronic images of bodies nearby. There's no 'VR restraint suit' keeping the goggles on your head, nor pinning arms down and forcing legs apart. If VR someday adds mechanical 'body bags' that are capable of choking, moving, and actually penetrating real bodies then you may have a point. Maybe. The VR device user would still have had to voluntarily enter a VR chamber/body bag to make the fantasy fiction experience possible.
VR behaviors may well be psychologically damaging, but I see no world where voluntary VR participation could be a crime per se. If physically kidnapped and forced into a negative VR experience, you have a simple crime regardless of the VR tools. See the *Saw* horror films for that possible future.
See *Surrogates* above, Arnold Schwarzenegger's *Total Recall*, *The Matrix* and all the other VR-themed movies on the list below for how sci-fi writers imagine VR's future.
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls023341708/
Is this a joke? In virtual worlds you can murder people for fun -- but rape is horrifying? And only if the victim is a female IRL?
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