Thread: Sex Crimes in Virtual Worlds

cut n paste from http://pervscan.com/



Sex Crimes in Virtual Worlds

» From the Cybersex Department
“Blogger opinions were mixed after a German TV news magazine uncovered virtual child sex within the virtual-reality community. Prosecutors in Halle are investigating ‘persons unknown’ with a view toward bringing charges. ‘We’ll try to find out the name of the person responsible,’ Senior Prosecutor Peter Vogt of the Division for the Prevention of Child Pornography told the TV news magazine Report Mainz. ‘This sort of criminal activity is punishable by a term of imprisonment of between three months and five years.’ The news magazine documented that juvenile alter egos in the virtual community Second Life, called avatars, were being used to simulate child sex — and being sold for virtual profits within the alternate reality platform. Robin Harper, vice president of Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, told the television program that the company would investigate who was behind the images and pass on the information to the police. But child-protection activists have criticized Linden Lab for not programming its site to reject child-sex images, and psychologists worry that such role playing could encourage real cases of child abuse.” — Deutsche Welle (Germany)
(Thanks to Furpo and James for links.)

Second Life is an online virtual world where users can interact using surrogate characters called avatars. It is wrong to compare it to a video game, since there are no points, scores, losers or winners. It is more like a costume party. You create an account, download the proprietary software necessary to access the world, and then romp around in the imaginary world, which is pretty much like the real one: you can interact with other people, buy and sell goods, and so on. Second Life is not the only such virtual world, since these online “metaverses” have been around pretty much as long as networked computers. But it is one of the most prominent.

Like any community, Second Life has developed a seedy side. There are strippers. Prostitution is rampant, with one Second Life employee venturing that some 30% of transactions in the world relate to sex and gambling. A well-publicized “rape” has caused (real) Belgian police to begin monitoring Second Life. There are all sorts of “furries,” people who dress up like animals and engage in pseudo-bestiality. And now there is child porn and child sex, which has caused all sorts of perplexity ranging from the technical (how’d somebody hack the system to do it?) to the legal (is it ok to engage in illegal sexual behavior in a make-believe world?).

The issues raised by this illicit behavior are as predictable as they are intractable. On one hand, it seems wrong to assume that acts carried out in fantasy will necessarily spill over into reality. People aren’t simians acting out monkey-see-monkey-do sex crimes. What’s next — Nabokov’s great novel Lolita will be censored for fear it will make pedophiles out of English majors? And yet, on the other hand, it is equally disturbing to assume that acts carried out in fantasy won’t spill over into reality. Aren’t these role-playing worlds like flight simulators where deviants will hone the desires and skills they can apply to real-life sex crimes? If you rape a thousand children in cyberspace, will it be so inconceivable to rape one in reality?

Ugh. You could drive yourself crazy arguing these issues back and forth. In fact, people have already been engaging the debate since Julian Dibbell published his now classic article “A Rape in Cyberspace” in 1993.

However, no matter where you stand on the issues, there are two certainties here. First is that, given the incredible proliferation of deviant behavior online, it is safe to assume that people need their pathologies. Whether it is a confirmation of the most pessimistic view of mankind (we’re all evil!) or an expression of deep psychological truths (we’re all sick!) is difficult to say. Either way, deviance is here to stay. Second, it seems equally likely that virtual communities will learn to police themselves. Just as sites like Craigslist and Digg enable users to monitor content, so too will these virtual worlds do the same. It’s the only practical way they can deal with issues of online malfeasance — and you wouldn’t have to be a betting man to wager that, sometime very soon, you will see a news meme about the residents of some virtual world committing acts of online vigilantism against some perv who goes one step too far over the line.

don't read around too much at that pervscan site.