Gamers who carry out virtual rapes in the ‘metaverse‘ should be charged as real-life sex attackers, a legal expert insists.
Assaults are rife on the digital ‘avatars’ used by women and children in the online world, which, it is claimed, can leave them with trauma similar to real ordeals.
Players wearing virtual reality headsets often use interactive gloves and bodysuits to experience physical touch in the 3D games, meaning they will feel an assault on their avatar.
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.
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.
The case last year, revealed by the Mail, was thought to have been the first time in the UK that police had investigated a virtual sex offence.
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’.
She said the law covers touching with any part of the body, ‘with anything else and through anything’, adding that it could be interpreted to include touching through an avatar.
‘The metaverse is growing rapidly and we see abuse, sexual violence and hate speech,’ she added.
Hellbound and Down 