Women appear to be unsafe, not just in the real world. In the virtual world, they are likewise at risk. That is an unprecedented event for a researcher who was observing user behaviour on the site only to fall ‘victim’ to a virtual rape!
Should she have gone into the virtual reality world with a ‘chaperone’ to do her research? She travelled alone onto the platform, only to discover that it isn’t entirely free of nefarious characters.
This incident is not the first reported. In Feb, a woman, Nina Jane Patel who works as the vice-president of metaverse research in Kabuki ventures was gang-raped virtually in Meta’s metaverse.
The researcher claims that the incident occurred an hour after she put on her Oculus Virtual-reality headset.
SumOfUs produced a paper last week called “Metaverse: Another Cesspool of Toxic Content,” which recounts the researcher’s violent encounter in Meta’s Horizon World.
The researcher was invited to a private party on Horizon World, where individuals in the same room asked her to disable her safety bubble setting, according to the study.
A link to a video that, according to the group, depicts what occurred to the researcher’s avatar from her point of view.
A male avatar gets quite close to her in the video, as another male avatar looks on. A bottle of what looks to be booze is transferred between the two avatars in the 28-second video, while male voices make filthy comments.
Another user kept telling the researcher to ‘turn around, so he could do it from behind,’ while users outside the window could watch.
When another user touches you, the hand controllers vibrate, generating an extremely disorienting and even disturbing physical feeling during a virtual assault, says the researcher.
‘It happened so fast, I kind of disassociated. One part of my brain was like wtf is happening, the other part was like this isn’t a real body, and another part was like, this is important research,’ she said.
Many individuals are eager to reject virtual reality assault as it is something that did not occur in the real world.
When doing such acts, is the ‘sexual’ attack by users on another user in a virtual world become a non-consensual sexual relationship? It is a virtual world, but everyone has rights even in a virtual world, some say.
And that is why experts are calling the attack a virtual rape, as it was an act perpetrated without the consent of the victim.
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