Last week Wired.com’s Regina Lynn gave her two cents on rape in Second Life. In her column, which calls virtual rape “traumatic, but not a crime,” Regina’s explains that Brussels police are supposedly sending a task-force into the game to investigation allegations of in-world rape. The story has raised questions about applying real-life law to in-game assault, as well as the old favorite, “Is online rape really rape?”
Most notably, Regina’s piece is missing details about the actual incident. But in all fairness those are pretty hard to find, especially considering the main reportage on the subject is in Dutch. What we can check out is the original posting in English. Though it doesn’t give us much to work with either, it does raise some eyebrows. The second paragraph of the post reads: “A very big part of the Second Life community consists of deviant personalities who dress up as ‘furries’ (mostly human-like cats) and interact with each other through all sorts of bizarre virtual sex toys. The Brussels police will certainly have an interesting case there…”
Deviant personalities? Bizarre virtual sex toys? Now, I can’t read Dutch, but nowhere else in this post does it imply that furries had anything to do with the rape incident. Even if there was a furry involved, what would that have to do with furries as a whole? Maybe Regina is right; maybe the whole thing is one bad joke. It may as well be. Because honestly, I’m never going to take my news (translated or otherwise) from a source as biased and judgmental as that.
Bonnie Ruberg is a sex, technology, and video games journalist who contributes regularly to publications like The Economist, Forbes, and The Village Voice. By day she's also a comparative literature PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she studies French, English, gender, sexuality, surrealism and perversion. You can reach her at [her first name and last name, all one big word] AT gmail DOT com.
May 9th, 2007 at 7:44 am
Related: BBC reports on a Second Life “virtual child abuse” claim in Germany:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6638331.stm
There are a few problems with this article, but I won’t deny Bonnie the pleasure of pointing them out.
May 9th, 2007 at 9:33 am
I’m no lawyer, or law student for that matter, but there are often lesser sentences for people who commit crimes who didn’t know that what they were doing was against the law (I don’t know the details/caveats so no one rail me on this one). In virtual worlds it will become harder and harder to establish that what is illegal in real life, also is illegal online. How can those things ever be made concrete, or should they?
May 10th, 2007 at 8:14 am
Ah, questions questions. Luckily, I’m not a legally minded person, otherwise my head would be spinning :).
October 25th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
….
Teleport out if you don’t like it.
June 12th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Virtual reality rape is no less devistating than rape. The new technology allows what is termed virtual (mind) rape and also rape using EMF waves and non-lethal weapons. Rape is defined as CONTROL and if someone has control over your mind it is RAPE. WE NEED NEW LAWS TO PREVENT PERVERTS FROM USING ANY TECHNOLOGY, COMPUTERS, NON-LETHAL WEAPONS OR DIRECT ENERGY TO RAPE OR SEXUALLY ASSAULT WOMEN, CHILDREN AND MEN. IT IS NOT IMPORTANT IF IT IS ON THE INTERNET OR IN YOUR HOME.
December 5th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Tell me how to find out about this virtual rape using emf weapons. It’s happening to me. It did this morning. I’m a professional woman, with a professional career. How can this be happening?