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Police investigate virtual sex assault on girl's avatar
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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I can't make up my mind on this one. On one hand we probably should make some rules etiquette and laws regarding VR, but on the other hand I made it through the Halo series just fine and was able to separate myself from what those people did to my corpse.
So...many...teabags
I would classify this as sexual harassment. It's no different from being sent obscene videos over email. The gravity resides in that they're sexual assault videos with the recipient being the victim.
This situation reminds me of the deepfake porn issue that's been going around as well. Ofc there are differences, but mainly I mean the confusion around it of 'how he hell do we categorize this'. I don't know nearly enough to make a judgement here, but yours does sound reasonable imho.
(People have been saying this website isn't super trustworthy, so I'm taking it with a grain of salt. Even if the story is fake - I'm not saying it is, for all I know it may be true, though I hope not - I imagine it's still worthy of discussion as something that could happen.)
Having been involved in something that was actually bad, I can say with certainty that there are enough rules already (in most places) that apply to these sorts of situations. Harassment and stalking crimes cover the sorts of things that need to be handled by police. If someone teabags you in Halo, or curses at you or says disgusting things in a voice chat, you either block them or shake your head and move on. If they follow you around through multiple lobbies, send/spam pictures or post/spray real pictures of genitalia (in places where it is not supposed to be, such as your inbox/cellphone/vr lobbies, obviously not talking about nsfw sites), those things are already crimes covered by harassment/stalking/sexting crimes.
There may be a few edge cases where someone can skirt the laws, but again, in my experience, the statutes are broad enough to catch almost everything you could imagine and want to be a crime.
Totally agree with you! If we are talking laws, it needs to be covered by general laws. Hopefully it already is wherever ppl are. It makes no sense to create specific laws for online games and VR games. Otherwise the next new tech needs its special law again, and the making of law is always late.
If we are talking etiquette, Netiquette exists.
I guess federation workers played a prank on me. Removed duplicate replies.
I was definitely left wondering why all those existed.
crouch crouch crouch
Dip dip potato chip
It's a little silly at this stage, but I think there needs to be a legal framework around this thing now because eventually, our games will be realistic enough and immersive enough that this could become a serious issue.
You're joking right? Read about Ellen Page and the Beyond:Two Souls controversy.
Shit's already here. It's not just a little silly anymore. And with those AI deep fakes floating around, anyone can become a pornstar without even knowing about it.
People already killing themselves for fake rape allegations and social media pariah-ism, what now that fake porn with you in it can be made at any time?
This shit's a disaster in the making, not just a little silly.
This is the best comment in this thread so far. You make some excellent points.
What that girl experienced is definitely a form of harassment. And the VR part just made it more real than simple texts or photos. Which I think should be considered as a form of psychological assault.
And how fucked up must men and rape culture be that a girl can't even feel safe in a fucking virtual reality setting. Seriously, that's a big WTF. This is just sad.
I'd say it's more expected. People feel fat less social restraints when online. VR is no different.
Glad to see these opinions. A lot of this thread is full of ignorant people.
Image being on trial for playing Rimworld.
I'd get life in prison for sure.
They would launch us into the sun.
Absolutely not! That’s absurd. You can’t virtually rape someone or virtually assault someone. You can always just look away, remove the headset, or turn off the pc. You can always instantly remove yourself from the situation. You are never in a position of danger. You are never in any way being harmed. The police should arrest the person that called them for wasting their time.
You can always hang up the phone if you're getting repeatedly harassed on the phone too. That doesn't make it any less harassment. Of course it doesn't rise to the level of physical rape. That doesn't mean it isn't (intentionally) psychologically damaging. And, as I said, it needs to be done before it gets a lot more immersive, not because of the way things are right now. It could very well not be so easy to instantly remove yourself in the future.
Yeah but I am assuming you are an adult?
Kids get pulled into things like this and dont just remove the headset, they are much more malleable than a grown adult.
The question is, shouldnt their parents be supervising them? Perhaps their parents dont even know about these online worlds filled with people? Did the parents buy them VR without any research into what you can do with it? There's a lot of education that needs doing for both children and adults concerning online safety, more and more so as the online world advances.
That’s the parent’s fault for letting them play something without adult supervision.
Little Kids just shouldn’t be using this stuff, or should at least be supervised. Young adults can handle trash talk and gamer bs lol. This is such a non issue that people are just grasping at straws to try and make an issue it’s insane.
It's an issue if kids can get a hold of this stuff and access it, yes. Parenting is the main problem, I agree, but not every parent is competent enough to look out for this kind of stuff, also this stuff is often heavily marketed towards children.
I think adults sexually harrassing children online is an issue, if you don't, then I don't know what to say.
I mean what is sexual harassment in a game? Saying something vulgar? Getting close to their avitar? That’s not sexual harassment to me.
I don't know if this is true, but based on what I could find on google, cyber bullying is illegal in some places, including most US states (again, not sure about that, please correct me if I'm wrong). My point is, it's not a new idea to get the law involved in a situation regarding online harassment. A victim could probably avoid it by logging off, but the legal precedent seems to be that they shouldn't be expected to. That seems reasonable to me, just considering I wouldn't tell someone to 'just leave' an irl space because someone was harassing them.
I agree in that I wouldn't call what happened here 'rape' in a legal sense, but if you're saying that something is inherently harmless because it's done online, I strongly disagree. Otherwise, sorry if I misunderstood.