Police are investigating a virtual sexual assault of a girl’s avatar, the chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners has said.
Donna Jones said she had learned that a complaint was made in 2023, triggering a police inquiry.
The virtual incident did not result in physical harm but caused “psychological trauma”, the Daily Mail has reported a source as saying. Police chiefs have called on platforms to do more to protect their users.
…
The impact of the attack on the girl’s avatar was said to be heightened because of the immersive nature of the VR experience.
[the victim] suffered psychological trauma “similar to that of someone who has been physically raped”.
No she didn’t. I’m sure it wasn’t a pleasant experience, but let’s not over exaggerate the situation.
What a joke.
Real crimes are being compared to vr “crimes”. Next will be thought crimes.
Are you fucking kidding me?
They took cops off of real cases to work a VIRTUAL ASSAULT in a video game. (just harassment, not assault btw)
JFC I hope we fucking get nuked soon. We don’t deserve to live.
Maybe when an article says “The daily mail jas reported” we should completely ignore it until a better paper reports on it. Everything coming from the daily mail should be considered a lie.
The victim was in an online ‘room’ with a large number of fellow users when the virtual assault by several adult men took place.
Taken from the DailyMail. Neither article has details on which VR game/app she was, nor what kind of “assault” it was. The dailymail says it was “on the metaverse”, but “metaverse” could be VRChat, Fortnite or fucking Second Life for all we know. Could’ve even been on fuckzuck’s metaverse, Horizon Worlds, but isn’t it the place where you don’t have a bottom half and other avatars are forced to stay the equivalent of 1.5m away from you at all times?
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.
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.
In a game?? I kinda understand harrasment over the phone or messages or whatever, but in the game? Just change servers or fucking turn off your pc, lmao. Games are not a real place
Over the phone?? Just change phone numbers or hang up your phone. You aren’t even in the same place.
These are not the same things, if you’re afraid of being stalked that can happen regardless of how you interact online.
This isn’t real SA, this is a perversion of the law.
You’re not wrong, but the whole point of the article was basically “this is fucked up and something should be done about it. Can we use current laws to address it or do we need new ones?”
Helping to prevent people being harassed online is a good thing and doesn’t take away from the need to prevent it offline nor does it somehow invalidate people that have been assaulted.
My original tongue in cheek comment was in response to the victim-blamey comments acting like “it’s online, so it doesn’t count”.
I’m gonna try to level with you, and I need you to really pay attention to the words I use because I’m not insinuating anything other than what I’m saying.
I’ve seen VR chat. I know how online rooms like that work. If the person who was “SA’d” mistakenly clicked on a room that was far more lewd than what they were looking for, that’s on them. Ignorance is not a defense, and this is completely assuming that the “victim” was unaware of what they were doing when they entered the room.
There’s not a single piece of text suggesting that the “assault” or “harassment” continued offline.
This does not need a law. The only realistic thing to be done is to make sure rooms where stuff like this is prominent give a warning before joining. That is the only acceptable response, there is no reason for law to step in.
So it is the literal child’s fault for accidentally joining a “lewd” vr chat room…? The girl was under 16 in the article. If the VR chat service is setup so that literal children can get into sexually aggressive chat rooms completely unaware and by accident, I do believe there are a few laws being broken there.
If I’m not mistaken, rooms like this aren’t something you simply stumble into.
It’s harassment. The game or platform should ban or punish the user. This should be protected under free speech. It’s still disgusting though.
why would sexually harassing children fall under free speech? I agree with you that it’s not assault, but even in the absence of assault this behavior wouldn’t be protected speech in real life and it shouldn’t be protected speech online
It’s legally protected speech. In real life, you would get the shit knocked out of you, and rightfully so. In online, the most they can do is virtually beat them up or ban from the servers.
Edit: it depends on the severity of it too iirc. Saying “nice tits” isn’t as severe as “I’m going to rape the shit out of you”
You realize sexual harassment is illegal, right?
Actually, I didn’t know this before. I knew for sure it wasn’t allowed in the workplace or at school but didn’t know it was an actual federal law. Thanks for pointing that out.
Put her into a halo or cod lobby, show her a glimpse of what actuality harrasment let alone assault looks like.
If this woman actually thinks this was sexual assault than she’s lucky to have never had been an actual victim.