Professor Clare McGlynn, a law expert at Durham University, branded the metaverse a 'ticking time bomb' and warned that the number of sex attacks is set to 'explode' in the next few years.
Eh? Playing computer games is causing sexual assaults and rapes?
Apparently so, Reader, but not real ones.
Her paper, published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, found that a rising toll of 'meta-rapes' are going unpunished in the unregulated digital spaces. It cites a police investigation after a teenager was 'gang-raped', with officers concluding that she suffered the same psychological trauma as a real-life victim.
Ah, yes, I thought it sounded familiar. We've never heard the outcome of that case, have we?
Professor McGlynn's study, with Carlotta Rigotti of Leiden University in the Netherlands, proposes that existing laws should be applied to 'appropriate cases of meta-rape'.
Female wacademics, what would we do without them....
7 comments:
‘… the same psychological trauma as a real-life victim.’
Except that real-life victims don’t have the option of pausing the action or logging off as soon as things get out of hand (and possibly reporting immediately to a moderator).
Leaving aside the question of whether applying existing laws would trivialise the harm done to victims of physical attacks in the real world, are today’s supposedly computer-literate youngsters really so devoid of initiative that they would just sit there and endure a sustained virtual assault?
Sadly, there are those who use technology, starting with easy availability to internet porn, to push their own sexual preferences to extremes. Videos of people having consensual sex lead on to play acted scenes of dominance, bondage, or mind control. After a while, even these begin to pall and so the viewer looks for something new and more exciting. It was only a matter of time that computer games producers would begin to cater for the fetishes of the sad, sick, people in society, hence the introduction of gang rape games. I would suggest that mutilation, and child abuse will be the next games, if not already available now. When even these begin to pall, and they will, the danger is that the sickos, finding it difficult to differentiate between computer fed fantasy, and reality, will take their fetishes into the real world.
I'm not a psychiatrist, just a bloke who spent too many years as a Police officer, dealing with offenders who couldn't tell the difference between the treatment of women in porn films, and the treatment of women in real life. Civilisation is doomed. We will return to the stone age because the results of this advance in technology seems to be human nature.
Penseivat
Actually, the forces of prudery have been trying to prove that porn leads to sex crimes for centuries. All the available data point in exactly the opposite direction. McGlynn, like so many nowadays, seems to be unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
Stonyground.
Well, quite, surely they are able to cope better than adults?
Better they confine themselves to computer-generated filth than real filth, Penseivat?
Julia, I agree with your comment, but I would suggest that, human nature being what it is, they won't. They will, eventually, take that one step further, and then another.
Penseivat
Are they going to change players with murder if they kill someone who didn’t want to be killed?
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