Slashdot Mirror
Is Virtual Rape a Crime?
cyberianpan writes "Wired is carrying commentary on the story that Brussels police have begun an investigation into a citizen's allegations of rape in Second Life. For reasons of civil liberty & clarity we'd like to confine criminal law to physical offenses rather than thought crimes but already threats, menace & conspiracy count as crimes. Could we see a situation where our laws extend?"
I don't even understand the author's statement that "virtual rape" (whatever that means) could be traumatic. There's none of the implied threat of, say, harassing phone calls, or somebody on the street making cat calls (assuming that your virtual persona is sufficiently separated from your real world persona that a person harassing you online isn't stalking you for real). You certainly can't be physically hurt. And if somebody is saying or doing something you don't like, you sign off, or go to another area. So how could this be traumatic AT ALL, much less traumatic to such a degree that warrants comparison to rape?
http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html
rape
n.
1. The crime of forcing another person to submit to sex acts, especially sexual intercourse.
2. The act of seizing and carrying off by force; abduction.
3. Abusive or improper treatment; violation: a rape of justice.
We should have a virtual congress and a virtual Constitution for the internet.
I vote 4chan to write our Constitution.
Virtual rape is a crime as much as stealing a car in GTA is a felony and as much as killing an MMORPG character in PVE is a murder.
Seriously, are we all suddenly a bunch of pussies? If someone starts calling us names online, we can't have the sense to block them on our messenger of email or forums or wherever else they're bothering us? Are we that fucking mushy and pudgy and brainless and spineless that all we can do is sit there and take the supposed "abuse" until some heroic legislator shows up on a white horse to save us from this life-changing and horrifying crime?
Here, let's try another experiment:
Someone writes "I am inserting my penis into your unwilling vagina" to you via instant messenger and you click "block this person" and never hear from them again.
Or . . .
Someone lures you into a private room at a party and then forcibly rapes and violates you. You try to cover yourself enough to escape the party afterward, go home and sit in a shower and bleed while inspecting the bruises that were left on your body and then when you go back to your group of friends, you feel compelled to pretend that nothing ever happened and even be civil to that person around them, because you somehow feel guilty for what they did to you and you spend the rest of your life being affected by the physical attack and it impacts your every thought and action - especially with the opposite sex - for the next forty years.
Yes, I can see how the two are alike.
This may take awhile but I'll get to the point.
In one particular MUD I used to play, if you died there were painful consequences such as huge xp loss and loss of all your equipment. As a result, you really wanted to avoid dying and it made the game very exciting. In addition, players could PvP freely. Since you could keep all the equipment of any character you killed, it made pure PvP a very profitable exercise.
Now, people would form groups of "randomers" and walk around the world randomly killing characters. Some people would be assholes by killing people that didn't have any equipment, were clearly newbies, or just wanted to kill monsters. The randomers found it exciting and were having fun, but obviously the player on the receiving end did not enjoy it. The randomers would try to excuse their behaviour by saying "its just a game, I can be an asshole," which is wrong.
Everyone personifies their character to a degree. They spend hours playing them, leveling them, and imagining their surroundings as they do quests. Its like how you suspend disbelief as you read a good book or watch a movie. So, when these high-level randomers come around and your character dies and you lose a lot of hard earned progress, it hits you pretty hard emotionally. I would compare it to the "virtual rape" the article talks about, since the randomer has complete power over you and he's taking pleasure in your "rape". Even though its just a game, you can't argue that this is a moral thing to do.
One obvious solution is to not get so connected with your character. This, in my opinion, is a poor solution because the connection is what makes the game interesting. As an aside, I found that the loss of this connection is what turns someone into a randomer.
A better solution is to educate the player so they are not so easy prey and can use in-game mechanisms to avoid the problems. Using the MUD as an example, the player needs to realize that they can be attacked anywhere at any time and should be on the lookout. Once you're an informed and experienced player, you'll rarely get randomed. Another example: "In Second Life, flying penises may appear during your press conference, do not be alarmed." In real life, it would be like knowing not to walk around seedy streets at night wearing skimpy clothes.
Griefers, rapists, and jerks will be ever present in games and real life. You won't be able to avoid them all, but if you're smart you won't be burnt so often.
And if there are any griefers reading this, please stop being jerks. It ruins the game for everyone else.
The terminology is important. If you go around claiming that online sexual harassment is "rape," few people are going to take you seriously. I'm certainly not. Imagine if someone wrote a blog article claiming that it is murder to destroy an online character (permanently) in a "game" such as 2nd Life. Is it wrong? Yes. Is it murder? Not even close. Am I going to take the blogger seriously? Not likely. Even if there are some important points, I'm lost at very mention of the word "murder." Same with "rape" in this case. Once you use the word rape to describe online sexual harassment, I'm going to tune you out and look for rational people to talk to.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
You know, while at first I just thought "these people are idiots, this ain't a crime", your idea genuinely has merit :). If you commit a crime in the virtual world, there should be virtual authorities that can catch you and punish you within the confines of the virtual world. They'd have to search for you within the game though, and "physically" locate your toon and subdue you.
:).
It could actually make the game world more interesting IMHO
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
No, killing is not worse than rape. If you are killed, your suffering ends at that point. If you are raped, your suffering goes on for the rest of your life. I am the husband of a rape victim (posting anonymously for obvious reasons), and I assure you that it affects my life on an almost daily basis. I'm certain if affects hers more than anyone can imagine. The only thing worse than rape is rape of a child.
In fact, I think many of the actual problems in developing countries (when I say actual problems I do not mean, for example, drug abuse, but anti-social behaviour - which could possibly stem from the former) are caused by a two-horned problem: many people today are either pussies or dicks. Not to get to "Team America" about it, but if people weren't dicks - i.e. were, in the most honest sense of the word, nice, life would be a whole lot more pleasant. If the root cause of people's dickishness were found, and people started smiling more, saying "Good morning," talking to people whom they never met before, I think we'd all be phenomenally more happy. I know that when I am party to such idle pleasantries I feel significantly more chipper than I did beforehand. The second problem - that people are pussies - allows the dicks to flourish. If we weren't such pussies, then we'd put would-be dicks quickly in their place - shame them with the power of public embarrassment. Of course, there is no stable middle equilibrium - once we have too many pussies, the dickishness of the dicks increases such that more people become pussies for fear of their shaming backfiring. Thus we achieve the current aura on the underground, where few dare look or speak to anyone they don't know.
im in ur
The key difference between engaging sexually with a minor and rape is that the former is a crime of communication, whereas the latter is a crime of physical action. In the first case, the crime is being committed simply over a different medium of communication, namely the internet, just as stealing money from an online bank is a real crime being committed over a different medium. However, physical rape cannot be committed over the internet anymore than vehicular manslaughter, because the medium has no capabilities of causing real world consequences, at least until computers are in charge of driving are cars like they are in charge of banking systems. However, this is simply speaking legally. Morally, it's still disgusting.
I am a victim of many years of physical abuse and not a rape victim only because, where I come from, overt gays would be probably beaten to death themselves. I agree that being subject to crime can bring in depression, being unable to stand up for yourself in other situations and many other unhealthy tendencies. But, unless someone cuts off your limbs, you should never say that the crime was worse than killing or that suffering should go on for the rest of your life. If you are an adult with previously healthy life, give yourself 3 years. If the crime "still affects your life on daily basis", your suffering is no longer caused by the criminal. Rather, it's your own self-destructive behavior and thought patterns as well as possibly people close to your or society at large that prop up your "victim" or "damaged" image.
As an example, think of Jessica Lynch. Yes, lots of lies have been told about the events in Iraq. But, without question, she was rapped and severely injured on her mission. Does she sound like a victim to you? I hear she got married and had a daughter shortly after coming home.
Exactly so. What is "virtual rape"? I'm not familiar first-hand with Second Life, but "virtual rape" would be entering a series of commands that result in a graphical representation of two people have sex, where presumably the real person controlling the other graphical representation doesn't consent. If it's so, or anything similar, then I see it as being the same as creating a rape scene via Blender and posting it online. Disturbing? Sure. Illegal? No way. I mean, come on, if stuff like this becomes illegal, then it's just a very small step that remains to prosecution of writers like Stephen King for realistic description of rape/abuse/torture (King's work has the full spectrum, so to speak).
Now can she get virtually pregnant and want a virtual abortion? And would the pro-virtual life people protest? Is there a virtual Roe vs Wade? Now that is something to think about.
This is definitely what anti-rape campaigners want to see more of: frivolous application of the word rape to situations where it doesn't apply at all, further marginalizing real claims of rape. Score one for women's rights online!
However, if people want to take this seriously, I suggest that they take the virtual rapist who stuck his virtual penis in her virtual vagina and put him on virtual trial where he can perhaps be virtually convicted and go to virtual prison. Maybe at that point people would realize this is virtually retarded.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Could someone explain to me how on earth you can rape someone in a virtual world? I mean, you can send people explicit messages (the equivalent of a shady figure sidling up next to a real life woman in an alleyway and talking dirty for a few seconds until she wanders off unharmed), animate your avatar in their general vicinity (like if the aforementioned shady figure started vigorously humping the air a meter away from the helpless victim, who is still free to wander off unharmed), or trick them into allowing you to animate their avatars, which they can cancel at any time (Mr. Shady Figure offers a hug, the woman accepts, he tries to cop a feel, she says no, and he immediately stops and can't touch her anymore).
I'm not seeing any rape here.
Even assuming that there is such a thing as "virtual rape", it leaves no scars. Avatars don't really have the concept of virginity -- having someone's e-peen clip through your avatar's bum doesn't change anything, physically or otherwise -- and if you identify so strongly with a pixelated version of yourself that a few naughty words or an animation that you can easily walk away from is enough to cause "trauma", you need help. Seriously, if you think you've been e-raped, and you honestly feel that it was a "traumatic" experience, gtfo the internet. You need sunshine, fresh air, something to get you back into reality. If a kid drew a couple of stick figures having sex and labelled one of them as you, that wouldn't be rape, would it? Of course not. That's what Second Life is. Imaginary. A world where rape can't happen. So stop treating it like it's equivalent to the real world -- it just trivializes the suffering of all the real rape victims out there.
Also, if you accept a sexually explicit animation from someone and don't stop it before anything happens, you can always change avatars to something weird like a squirrel or something and gross out the "rapist". It's hard to grief anyone with a sense of humour, so they'll leave you alone.
Terminology will be a problem here since in many legal systems, intent matters. The key difference between thought crime and other classes of crime is crossing that threshold of thinking about something, wanting something, and doing something about it. That is, projecting that thought outward to a victim.
Conventionally, the projecting outward is a physical action. However, in some cases, simply communicating with the victim is enough. Free speech doesn't cover credible threats to harm someone, extortion, etc.
In the case of threats, the reasonable belief of the victim can make all the difference. If I tell some random person I'm going to zap them with my Flash Gordon destructo-ray it's not a crime because they have no reasonable belief that they will be harmed. Same threat but with a .38, and I have comitted a crime even if I don't actually own a .38.
The large difference between involuntary manslaughter and first degree murder rests entirely on intent.
True thoughtcrime is the criminalization of intent even in the absense of any action whatsoever. Criminalizing online predation is NOT thoughtcrime because in addition to intent, the perpitrator must take some positive action (logging in and sending messages). In your example, they take the further positive action of arranging a RL meeting and then actually going to the meeting as arranged.
Beating someone with a bat is battery, telling them you intend to do so is assault (if a reasonable person would expect them to believe you).
What this comes down to is that the law already recognizes that taking an action (any action) with the intent to cause someone distress IS a crime. There's plenty of gray in the law here (for better or worse). Generally being an asshole and enjoying creating annoyance is often not seen as a crime (for example trolling or flamebaiting). The law is not perfectly clear on the threshold where online actions rise to the level of criminal or even civil liability (though there IS a point where persistantly trolling singled out individuals can be interpreted as harassment).
So virtual rape IS a crime if a reasonable person would anticipate that it would cause distress. That is a question the courts have yet to address. People DO get quite wrapped up in virtual characters. Often they identify their avatars as a part of themselves. Virtual rape is not thoughtcrime since it also requires specific acts towards a victim. If virtually raping an AI were a crime, then it would be thoughtcrime.
IMHO it IS reasonable to expect virtual rape to cause distress.
So, if my female avatar gets virtually raped and becomes virtually pregnant, is she virtually protected by Roe v Wade in getting a cyber-abortion? Also, if my avatar enters a virtual-virtual world and gets virtually-raped 2 levels in, is that a crime, too? What if some stick-figure dude icon stands next to my stick-figure babe icon and the message "you got raped!" appears in all caps in the console panel playing Ultima 3 : Exodus Online in my Apple 2 emulator?
*COUGH* *COUGH* *COUGH*
OK now that someone has explained how rape could be punished in second life.
Can someone please explain to me how the hell one character can rape another in second life?
What did they do?
Walk off for a coffee came back to find three guys going to town on their their second life character?
Having never played the game, my limited knowledge of the game's dynamics tells me "rape" as I know it is a little hard to accomplish in second life.