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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?"
virtual rape is not a crime.
if you are being virtually raped you should log off.
there. that's fixed.
This
I don't even understand how you could ask yourself the question. Of course it isn't.
As someone who spends a lot of time online, I'm usually the one pointing out that despite the fact a conversation takes place over the internet, human emotion is still involed. One shouldn't assume that their actions have no social consequences.
However, in the realms of RPG, one should come to expect that there are people who seek to disrupt the experience for everyone else and move on.
I also disagree with the suggestion that threats are unjustly illegal.
Was she virtually asking for it?
Don't flame me, I know it's awful.
Does winning a match of CounterStrike make you a mass murderer?
Everything about TFA is ridiculous.
You could get sent to virtual prison.
"Hey! What the hell are you doing to my character>!?!?!"
"You said you'd f*ck me! It's in the chat logs! It's consensual! You have nothing on me!! HAHAHAHAHAHA"
Teabagging after a good round of pwnage will be illegal now.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
This is not a court case. It's not a first-hand account. It's not an outraged person.
It's a blog.
Not even a blog by someone it happened to. Just a blog trying to gain attention.
Rape in online games is almost impossible to pull off. You have to Get the person to stand still for it, not report you, and not log off. Even assuming that you are camping the Sword of Killing and you've been sitting there for 5 hours, it's hard to believe you'd let something happen that scars your very soul to get it.
That's what rape is. A scar that's so deep it marks your soul.
No, what they're really talking about is simply harassment. Calling it rape is an insult to anyone who has ever been raped. Someone saying naughty words to you in a video game, or even having their character make nasty gestures, is NOT on the same level as rape.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
A rape can be simulated in SL just fine, but it's stupid to compare it to the real thing. It's most definitely a reason to ban somebody, but for a lawsuit?
In SL, people can make your avatar execute an animation if you give consent. Things that involve animating both avatars, such as a hug for instance, are initiated by one of them, and the other must click "ok" to accept the offer.
Of course they could make it be misleading by presenting it as something harmless and then make the actual thing be nasty, but you can always teleport away, and reset all animations in progress (it's an option in the tools menu). It's not really possible to do something to somebody that they'd be unable to stop.
It ain't rape, but it ain't right.
You can't take the sky from me...
Actually, there has been a case like the one you describe..you can read about it right here
(i am so getting modded down for this)
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
Let's see. virtual rape is all 1's and 0's. Has anybody examined the bits to see if any of the 1's were stuck through the middle of any of the 0's? I can forsee a day when a judge has redefined the bit '1' as male because it looks like a big cock, and a '0' could be a cunt hole.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
So a better example would be ...
... of some kind ... right?
Compare being raped for an hour
to
not being able to go to the pizza place on the corner because there's some guy there that the management refuses to kick out who will scream obscenities at you.
Yeah, yeah, I know. That's the place where you were supposed to meet a new client. So it has to be a crime
Which is why we have "civil cases" and "criminal cases". Not everything that happens to you is a crime.
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.
Sentence them to Virtual time in a Virtual prison.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
But, the article brings up an interesting point, one that I didn't really know:
"Our laws say that an adult subjecting a teenager or child to sexual words, images or suggestions on the internet is preying on their mental and emotional state in a sexual way. Even if you never try to meet the minor in person, and even if you never touch them or expose your naked self to them, it is a crime to attempt to engage sexually with a minor."
If this is in fact, the case, then apparently sexual content in a virtual setting, already IS a crime...which to me is a slippery slope. It seems strange to me, that if you have not committed or tried to commit a physical crime...that just insinuating and talking about it online, can be a crime. To me that borders on thought crime.
In the case of the quoted part about sexual 'preying' on minors, while disgusting...and I'm talking more about plain text, I'm not sure how it can be illegal? How could the person on the other end know it really was or was not a minor? If it was not a minor they were talking to (but, instead a cop), then what crime was commited since no minor was exposed to the content?
To stretch it out further. Murder is a crime. Is it a crime to write about an explicit murder of a real person, and post it online, if in fact no threat to actually carry it out are given? What about other illegal activity...illegal sexual activity...is it against the law to write about it and publish it?
I dunno...I'm having a hard time with something done in a 'virtual' world...where no physical activity has been commited or even threatened, can be criminal. Not pleasant? Sure...but, a prosecutable offense? I don't think so.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Happens all the time though. Plenty of "Pedophiles" set up dates with "Teenage Girls" and end up meeting FBI agents and going to jail. On the intent to have sex with someone who didn't exist in the first place, and was just a persona of an above the of age of consent FBI agent. Stew on that for a while. "Terrorism" and "Think of the Children!" are a very, very effective Denial of Service on our civil liberties.
Yes, you're right. This is clearly an insult to victims of FIRST LIFE (ie, real life) rape. 'VIRTUAL RAPE' is just another term coined by 'SHITTY LAWERS' who need to make more money. Nobody felt violated and physically hurt by this action. If anybody else think otherwise, they should get a REAL LIFE and stop being so bloody stupid. I dare anybody with an IQ higher that 60 to challenge me on this.
My god. If I changed my .sig to "I'm inserting my virtual penis into your unwilling virtual vagina", would I become the worlds most prolific serial virtual rapist? That would be virtually awesome!
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
However, it would be totally appropriate for Linden virtual justice system to order virtual incarceration complete with virtual prison showers. Or even virtually lethal injection whereupon your virtual assets are given to the victim and you are never allowed to apply for another account.
> Sentence them to Virtual time in a Virtual prison.
With Virtual assrape!
You can write scripts that take control of other people's avatars. I didn't play for long before getting bored with SL, but usually this is used so people can click on objects and then their avatars interact with them. E.g., if you click on a chair you'll sit in the chair, if you click a bed you'll lie down, if you click a swing set you'll start swinging.
There are certain situations where your avatar can get "stuck" -- I got stuck between a hammock and a wall once and it took me about 5 minutes to extricate myself. Another time, I got stuck in a "dancing" script after clicking a button and then losing track of where it was, and couldn't stop dancing until I found the "off" button for the dance.
Usually, it's all fun, but scripts have a high potential for abuse if you make them hard to turn off.