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About two weeks ago our own Aimee Weber reported on an investigation into a virtual rape by the Belgian police.

Discussion, and a fair amount of FUGing of the issue has spread through the blogosphere and mailing lists:

    Virtually Blind attempts to consider the legalities of it

  • Hiro Pendragon has a nicely reasoned through set of ideas and comments
  • Wired has a thought-provoking piece that is quite readable
  • VtoR carries a, if I can say this without offence, typically male response to the problem.

One of the things that has come up, to my surprise, is the number of people on mailing lists reporting experiences they perceived as attempted or actual virtual rape. I’ve been stalked in SL, but never in a position that has made me feel anything like at risk of being raped. I’m lucky enough that I can say the latter in RL too (I’ve never been stalked in RL either).

Continues….

Given how disturbing being stalked in SL was, and trust me, it’s the thing, even above all the bugs and the 10 days I spent crashing every 20 minutes before a patch could be rolled out, that brought me closest to leaving SL: it was that unpleasant; I have nothing but sympathy for victims of virtual rape. I’m firmly in the camp that it can be done, although I would also say there are significant other parts in RL rape that make it a more serious crime.

I’m not saying that there aren’t ways out of it: tp home, remove attachments, hit quit, hit mute, abuse reporting etc. between them cover the bases pretty well, and aren’t available IRL, but one of the characteristics of rape is that feeling of being trapped and not thinking straight. Laughing it off and saying it’s impossible is diminishing the real emotional trauma that is caused.

But… is this a big problem? Is it a small one, and I happen to be on a mailing list with a small number of very unlucky woman? Have you ever experienced it?

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