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.
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The impact of the attack on the girl’s avatar was said to be heightened because of the immersive nature of the VR experience.
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It sounds ridiculous that they assaulted an avatar. I think it is the wrong take. The avatar is just the medium. The target was obviously the person behind the avatar. It’s like saying that threats over text message is assaulting her phone.
Ssssh it’s okay iphone. Don’t listen to them. I know you were just protecting me from the bullies in high school
I didn’t know how to feel about the headline when I read it, is it possible to do that? I still don’t know. It’s not really for me to decide how SHE feels either. It just sounds… Weird? And not possible? I don’t know.
Regardless, in my mind, it depends on what the action was. If I send a text to your phone to hack it, then I guess I’m “assaulting your phone” but if the phone is the medium used to get to you then obviously it’s towards you.
And this can all be made moot by the software devs with an input box “keep non-friends N meters away”. Its all tech and virtual. Whatever she has a problem with can be an option to toggle for her.
Example from the article what it can look like:
Recalling the experience, Ms Patel told the same programme that she was “surrounded by three to four male-sounding and male-representing avatars, who started sexually harassing me in a verbal sense and then sexually assaulting my avatar”.
She said they had used misogynistic language and “continued to touch my avatar in a way that can only be described as a sexual assault of my avatar”.
So, I guess the appropriate terminology would be sexual harassment of the person by virtual sexual assault on their avatar in the VR space, or something like that.
I can imagine for an innocent person unprepared for it to be ganged and surrounded by deviants in VR sounds like it could be a proper traumatic experience. I don’t think there should be downplaying or normalizing this kind of experience for the sole reason that pervs are to be expected online. There is no reason to sink expectations of society to the lowest uncommon deranged denominator.
I feel guilty for that, I really do, but this description is very funny for me in a way a South Park episode could be.
It is absurd and funny, I agree, but only because it is not representative of what actually happened.
Yeah, I had and sometimes still have very strong feelings over much smaller unpleasantries in the Web, so it is bad.
No one is down playing it, it’s being up played by being labeled sexual assault. At worst this should be considered harassment.
Plenty of comments here alone dismiss everything about it.
We, as a seasoned internet nerd community and the gamers amongst us in particular, may have been exposed to edgy and lewd behaviour online since forever, not that it is a good thing.
It should not be considered normal that it happens everywhere online and it should not be expected that everyone should be as cynical and desensitised as we are.
But yeah. Assault is the wrong charge. It is sexual harassment. And it should be taken seriously.
It can’t be sexual assault.
[Edit: Sexual] Assault is physical contact.
No, that’s battery.
You’re thinking of battery
Downvoted for being right. Reddit 2.0
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/part/1/crossheading/assault
https://www.findlaw.com/state/new-york-law/new-york-sexual-assault-laws.html
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/penal-code/243-4/
You can look at other jurisdictions, but physical contact is core to the definition.
nope
https://vindicatelaw.com/assault-vs-battery-are-they-the-same-or-different-crimes/
The legal definition of assault is an intentional act that gives another person reasonable fear that they’ll be physically harmed or offensively touched.
No physical contact or injury has to actually occur, but the accused person must have intentionally acted in a way to cause that fear.
https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-charges/assault-and-battery-overview.html
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/assault_and_battery
Assault refers to the wrong act of causing someone to reasonably fear imminent harm. This means that the fear must be something a reasonable person would foresee as threatening to them. Battery refers to the actual wrong act of physically harming someone
I gave you the relevant jurisdiction and two major US ones. In all three cases, it cannot be sexual assault without actual sexual contact with the victim.
Regular assault isn’t relevant here.
And one of them says.
Five key things to know about California’s sexual battery laws are:
The one that also tells you California uses the terms interchangeably?
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.
I missed the Daily Mail bit. Thank you for pointing it out.
I guess you’d have a point if this didn’t really happen.
But the only evidence this did happen is from the Daily Mail so you can see the problem. It’s like trusting Fox as a reliable news source
Are you saying it didn’t happen, then?
This is sexual harrassment, not assault. It’s still disgusting, but there’s no reasonable expectation of harm. They can always take off the headset.
And yet it’s completely possible to kill someone with cyber bullying. Trauma is trauma.
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Imagine if someone had killed them in a VR game
It’s entirely reasonable that a panicking and scared child might forget they can escape by removing their headset, or experience enough to end up traumatised before they’ve got it off - if they don’t log out, too, they’ll know people are still there doing things to a representation of themselves. There’s still harm, even if the exact nature of the harm is different.
Of course. It’s still sexual harrassment!
Sure. That’s why the parent can look into what game they are purchasing, if it features multiplayer, if it connects you to voice chat, etc. And from that information they can make an informed decision - do I put my toddler in the VR headset so I can have some peace and quiet for the rest of the day, or do I maybe try to parent for a while longer?
Here’s a generous disclaimer: Don’t leave your kids next to me in a game. I’ll trick them into giving me their gear and then teach them the kind of new words that’ll make you pretend you don’t know them when they bring it up in public. You can do with that information what you will.
VR isn’t that believable yet. It’s not the Sword Art Online
The amount of murder I have done in gaming. I’m going away for a long time boys💀
[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.
If it had been my avatar, I wonder if they’d be making that claim. As in, if it was literally the same avatar but I’d been wearing the headset.
Yeah but wild we don’t over exaggerate the situation, how will I get all the attention?
I’m not so sure I agree with you. If I had a choice between getting raped IRL or Virtually, I would choose Virtually any day.
But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t get PTSD or some other trauma from being virtually assaulted. As far as I know, the brain sees all trauma equality because brains are dumb like that. So I think it is possible the victim is experiencing similar trauma to being raped IRL.
VR is immersive, but it isn’t that immersive, especially when it comes to user feedback
It’s not objective, it’s subjective. 100% of “immersion” is happening in your brain, where the signals received by your senses are being processed into experiences. Thus, different people will experience different levels of immersion, which is how things should be, instead of everyone being expected to try to feel the same as everyone else when faced with the same stimuli.
Basically you’re expressing an opinion. Which is fine, people can have those, but others can have other ones too. And that is also fine.
What I mean is there’s nothing pushing or pulling at you, you can clip your hand into the other person (or mush it to a point where it’s visually disconnected from where your arm is), you can easily remove yourself from the situation by logging off, taking the headset off, or both.
That’s fair. I can see a state of panic potentially being involved, but that could be addressed with technical improvements. Monitoring your eyeballs perhaps, and some sort of panic safety switch.
If it got that good vr would be in every household. Can’t wait to get a strangers finger up the bum.
More than just a finger probably
Finger and half?
We live in a clown world.
No we don’t.
Our world is complex and burying our heads in the sand about new frontiers of harassment does nothing good.
What does nothing good is diminishing what sexual assault actually means.
Please don’t kill people in Counter strike or they might get PTSD
Let’s wait for the feel suits to arrive before equating virtual “crimes” to real ones, especially in a medium where you can just block anyone, at most this should go in the same place a death threat via text goes for now.
Eh, I’d say death threats should be followed up on.
‘Virtual sexual harassment’ should be followed up on if it involves threats of real crimes.
Saying, “I’m gonna come to your house and rape you” is definitely cause for criminal investigation, if there’s enough evidence to make it viable.
Saying, “you like that, don’t you?” while “fondling” an avatar in VR is not cause for criminal investigation.
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?
the Daily Mail
Ah yes so file this under shit that never happened.
Assaulting someone in a VR game is still assault especially if they never consented.
‘Assaulting someone in a VR game is still assault especially if they never consented.’
Sarcasm?
The fact that this is even compared to real SA is so fucked up. At least on the internet or game you can leave, it’s not like your forced to endure the actions or behavior of other people.
What a joke.
Real crimes are being compared to vr “crimes”. Next will be thought crimes.
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Every GTA player sweating bullets right now.
I just feel like this would set a negative precedent for interactions in online games. Idk tho, not a lawyer.
