rape in second life

May 19th, 2007
by Laura Q

ann bartow @ feminist law profs posted an excerpt from an article on rape in second life, and some commentary. i encourage people to read it. my own take, tentatively, is that “virtual rape” is a form of communication, and as such is susceptible to the sanctions for communications. Depending on the circumstances, for instance, it could be sexual harassment, stalking, an assault (the common law definition of assault is intentionally causing reasonable apprehension of an immediate harmful or offensive contact), a threat, etc. I’d like to hear what other people have to say – especially women and people of color and other people subject to discrimination in real life, who then operate in game/role-playing space.

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Filed under Gaming, geek sexism | Comments (10)

10 Responses to “rape in second life”

  1. tekanji on May 20, 2007 1:57 am

    I started a thread on this subject over on the Iris forums.

    Personally, I’m for treating these issues seriously. Physical harm is not the only kind of harm that can be done, and we shouldn’t treat it as if it is.

  2. Laura Q on May 20, 2007 8:25 am

    I’ll check out the thread — I didn’t mean to imply that it shouldn’t be taken seriously. It should be subject to the potential legal remedies available for speech, as for harassment, threats, defamation, privacy violations, infliction of emotional distress, etc.

  3. alex on May 20, 2007 2:36 pm

    I was an active member of LambdaMoo in the 90′s and remember the traumatic fallout of the “virtual rape” that took place there. That was all plain text; I can only imagine it would be experienced much more viscerally in a visual online world.

    I’m surprised by those that said its “shitty” but “not a crime”. While it’s not rape in the sense of penetration, it is violating and emotionally harmful, and it should be treated as criminal although by a different name (unless society wanted to expand what ‘rape’ legally covered). At the very least, it could fall under some kind of verbal sexual harassment, although I think that’s not quite strong enough- perhaps we need a new classification for this.

    I’m not very familiar with 2nd life, but I think with the way it was done at LambdaMOO, some kind of privacy issues could have been called up if the law at the time was as it is now- it wasn’t exactly hacking into another user’s account, but was good-as doing so. It also interfered with players normal use of the system: that’s something most sites have rules against today in their TOS, and that should be enforced by the Online Service Provider at the very least, even if the law isn’t up to date enough to treat this as an actual crime.

  4. tekanji on May 20, 2007 6:50 pm

    Laura Q said:

    I didn’t mean to imply that it shouldn’t be taken seriously.

    Oops, I didn’t mean for my “personally” to seem like I was offering an “opposite” opinion to yours… I suppose it would have been easier if I had just said, “Personally, I’m in agreement with what you said.” o.o;;;

    alex said:

    I’m surprised by those that said its “shitty” but “not a crime”.

    If you realize that many people on the internet think exactly the same thing about date rape and acquaintance rape, your surprise might diminish slightly. But maybe I’m just jaded by all the internet misogyny….

  5. alex on May 20, 2007 7:20 pm

    tekanji, my surprise comes came from, unless i misread (correct me if i did), it was said by a woman. If it was a guy, I think I could understand but not agree with where he was coming from. Before the incident at LambdaMoo, I didn’t understand the gravity of stranger rape or unacquainted rape (even being in a similar situation, I pushed the experience aside and didn’t understand why others didn’t just do that too; I understood how horrific it was for a couple people I knew that were sexually abused as children at home, but that was different to me). Seeing how the LamdaMoo incident affected people I interacted with daily, and the way the power manipulation was done both socially and (odd as this might sound to others) through the coding, really brought it all into perspective for me.

  6. tekanji on May 21, 2007 12:47 am

    tekanji, my surprise comes came from, unless i misread (correct me if i did), it was said by a woman.

    Yes, it does appear to have come from a woman. Seeing as I just read last night a woman talking about how she thinks other women need less rights (and no, it wasn’t Ann Coulter), I am no longer surprised by misogynist women.

    It is, as you say, done both socially and through the coding: women are taught to hate on each other. We’re taught that it’s natural to be “catty”, to backstab, and to shun each other. And, especially for those of us trying to make it in a “man’s world” (such as gaming), we face that pressure even more because, we think, as long as we are “one of the boys” (and not like those weepy, irrational, emotional women) we are somehow safe.

    It’s both infurating and incredibly sad at the same time, but I don’t really know what to do about it except for trying to raise awareness about the problem of the issue, and do our best to provide rolemodels of female friendship in the media that we produce.

  7. Laura Q on May 21, 2007 8:42 am

    Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women looked at this phenomenon; from a fictional perspective, Handmaid’s Tale did, too — what was her name, Serena Joy?

  8. Jed on May 25, 2007 1:41 pm

    (Hoping this won’t be too much of a tangent from the main thread — I’m asking about this primarily because I think the answer might shed interesting light on the topic at hand.)

    Alex: did you read Julian Dibbell’s Village Voice article about the LambdaMOO incident? His discussion of that incident is the only description of it that I’ve read (I reviewed his book for Clean Sheets some years back), and I’m curious about whether others who were there at the time saw things the way Dibbell did. I guess I specifically wonder what your sense was of how the community felt about it, of whether (and to what degree) the community’s response was like the response to a real-world rape.

    And to Second Life players, I’m wondering what the community response there has been like. (I haven’t had a chance to read the Bartow article yet.)

    …I also wonder whether, in either the LambdaMOO case or the Second Life case, community response is at all shaped by how common online sex is/was (I hear) in those two communities in particular.

  9. alex on May 26, 2007 8:21 am

    Jed: I only read the article, and that, ages ago (but as I recall, it was pretty accurate). For various reasons, I was not interested in reading the book.

    I should clarify that my use of the word coding above was misunderstood- I meant, coding, as in computer programming, not social programming. And I think this is relevant- because most, if not all users back then had to pick up at least the basics, and most of the regular users learned much more. It was/is very easy to say “oh its a game, get over it!” when some one does something to hurt another… but what was done in the LM rape case (the voodoo doll) while not actually hacking into another account, was “good as” doing so- it disrupted the victim’s control of their character and all other player’s enjoyment of the world, and instilled a fear that their control could be taken from them as well, and all they could do to prevent it, would be to log out. So when I said above the coding aspect was eye-opening, I mean that for me at least, I think maybe for some others, that this sort of “translated” the experience and made it more understandable.

    And that said, not everyone reacted with horror- the details of which, I’m not comfortable discussing in this blog- I severed the offline friendship I had with the person who introduced to me to LM because of their “reaction” or “use” of the situation.

    I’m not sure that online sex was THAT much more common at LM than anywhere else- only that because it was a virtual world, the sex could be quite “fantastic”. Most of the sex on LM was kept to designated locations, the most popular probably being the aptly named “sex room” (a sort of anything goes public sex room the only distinctive feature I recall being a statue with a giant phallus, and several playrooms connected to it that could be locked for privacy. That an elaborate room was created might sound like sex was a big deal there, but keep in mind this was a very small part of a large sprawling mansion, backyard, street, alien crash site etc. There was a lot of D&D and such RPG’s and casual geeky non-sexual interactions thru-out the place. How “sex focused” it appeared depended on where you interacted, much like, how “sex focused” fandom appears, depends on what you’re interested in searching for and on which sites you do that searching. I started using LM for RP’ing, and then to keep connected with friends when we were separated between home/college.

    FWIW, while there were no “rules” at the time about what could be done where- I NEVER ever saw anything sexual in the main parts of the house (living room, kitchen etc.) where the rape happened (and I suspect that it wasn’t just done there to make sure there was an audience (for the sex room was popular, because hey, sex is popular pretty much everywhere, right? and that room certainly would have provided an audience), but because it was violating a social rule on top of everything else)

  10. Jade Reporting » June 17 on June 17, 2007 12:46 pm

    [...] rape in second life [...]

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