I never had an Atari console, but I remember playing “pong” at a friend’s house, when these “computers” first came out. Our family’s first computer was a BBC Electron with a whopping 16K of memory; enough to load – from a cassette – and play games such as “Chuckie Egg”, the goal of which was to engage in acts of larceny in a henhouse, stealing as many eggs as you can etc. By the time I went off to university, games were still largely played on home computers (the Nintendo came out in 1983, but in my community such items were pretty rare), but the graphics had evolved to a point where the facial expressions had advanced beyond those found on Lego people. Although I didn’t use IT (Information Technology – as it was referred to), much throughout my undergraduate years – we still had to calculate CHI squares, and Regression Analysis by hand – I was always fascinated by what computers could do. However, I was never that interested in virtual reality (VR), as I’d always, and still am, someone who would rather kick a football to a real person than play FIFA 2022, on a screen etc. I do vaguely remember sometime during the nineties about a breakthrough in software development that allowed a kind of flying seal/penguin (?), to move continuously through different landscapes that changed and were never identical, and being somewhat impressed (I’m the guy who went and saw the pyramids and came away with the memory that they were a bit too small to be classed as impressive i.e., basically an uninspired, crap Jewish building project, that resembles many of my own). However, the virtual world is becoming much more real, sometimes to the point where it’s difficult to determine CGI (Computer Generated Images), from reality, and this raises a question about how acts of violence that are perpetrated should be seen/judged in this realm. I am not talking about 3rd Party Shooter games, where those participating, are consenting to both shoot others and be shot at, but environments where avatars (characters that represent an actual person), engage in non-consensual acts of violence against other avatars.

From my understanding, the first known/recorded instance of a virtual rape, was reported by a New York journalist, in the “Village Voice”, in 1993, detailing a sexual assault that had occurred in 1990, in a virtual world known as LambdaMOO. A user (Bungle) took control of two other users’ avatars (legba and Starsinger), and forced them to have sex with their avatar, as well as commit degrading acts against themselves. This was done using a “voodoo doll”, a subprogram that attributed non-consensual actions to other user’s avatars. A similar rape/sexual assault, using the same process was committed in 2003 in the virtual reality program, Second Life, prompting the Belgian Police to initiate an investigation. These incidents started a debate concerning how events such as these should be legally addressed i.e., was a crime committed? And if so what law/statute was broken, in what jurisdiction, and who was harmed e.g., just those whose avatars were “attacked”, or extending to the larger number of players/avatars who witnessed the event etc. Whilst nobody experienced any actual physical harm, a person whose avatar was assaulted in this way, could understandably feel a degree of violation and subjugation, as their character – a representation of themselves – was forced against their will to engage in non-consensual acts etc. Because I don’t (as of now) interact in the metaverse or other virtual worlds, I have no personal conception of how someone might feel, being assaulted, and dominated in this way; especially being completely helpless to “fight back” because they had completely lost control of their avatar i.e., the assailant had 100% power over it, meaning that there was no option to even attempt to resist or fight back etc. Such assaults differ from cyber-bullying, in that the attacks target the avatar (a person’s representation of themselves – a virtual alter ego), rather than the actual individual.

In many ways these virtual sexual assaults share many similarities with a lot of real-life rapes e.g., a sense of violation, helplessness etc., but they are also somewhat different to most rapes as there is a “performance” aspect to them (something which is significant), in that they are conducted in front of a non-consenting audience; something that makes them different to a gang-rape, where everyone, apart from the victim, is at least somewhat complicit if not an active participant. This creates an added complexity to understanding the emotional/psychological trauma behind such assaults e.g., whilst there may be a level/degree of anonymity in that other users may not know who the “owner” of an avatar is in real-life, that character/personification has been sexually assaulted before the users of that virtual world, making the rape a very public affair/event.

It would be easy to dismiss virtual rapes, sexual assaults, and non-consensual acts of violence as not being harmful, or even not containing malice e.g., accepting the argument that it’s just users having a bit of fun with made up characters, and that no real/actual harm occurs etc. However, to view rape purely as a physical assault against an individual would be to dismiss the emotional and psychological trauma that results from such attacks, and to deny that a non-physical attack doesn’t potentially contain these elements. As virtual reality becomes a more immersive experience the lines between virtual and reality will become even more blurred, especially when the goal of the metaverse – and I’m using the term in its broadest sense, rather than to refer specifically to what Facebook/Meta is building – is for there to be a world which is virtually indistinguishable from the real world. By considering how sexual violence occurs at present in the virtual world we can increase our understanding of it in the real-world because the significance of the emotional and psychological aspects of such assaults has the spotlight shone on them due to the absence of the physical component of the attack. However, as the virtual world expands the phenomenon of virtual violence is one that will need to be addressed both societally and legally.