Police in the UK are probing the alleged gang rape of a girl’s virtual avatar in a virtual reality game marking the first such investigation of its kind which involves the metaverse.
A report by the UK-based Daily Mail said that the alleged victim, a sixteen-year-old girl, was wearing a virtual reality headset in an immersive game when her avatar was raped by avatars of several men. Avatars are usually animated representations of real-life users on the internet. They are a form of self-representation of a user.
Police officials told the newspaper that even though the accuser did not sustain any physical injuries her trauma may have been similar to someone raped in real life. “There is an emotional and psychological impact on the victim that is longer-term than any physical injuries,” the officer was quoted as saying by Daily Mail.
Questions were raised if the police in the UK, who have limited resources and are consumed by the load of unresolved real-world crimes, should tackle crimes committed in the metaverse or not but UK home secretary James Cleverly backed the probe and said someone who is committing such crimes in the metaverse could go on to commit such crimes in the real world.
“(Someone willing to rape a child’s avatar in a video game) may well be someone that could go on to do terrible things in the physical realm. I know it is easy to dismiss this as being not real, but the whole point of these virtual environments is they are incredibly immersive,” Cleverly was quoted as saying during LBC’s Nick Ferrari at Breakfast.
“And we’re talking about a child here, and a child has gone through sexual trauma. It will have had a very significant psychological effect and we should be very, very careful about being dismissive of this,” he further added.
The police, however, fear that it could be hard to prosecute those involved under existing laws because UK laws define sexual assault as physical touching in a sexual manner without consent.
Virtual sex crimes in Horizon Worlds, Meta’s free VR game, have surged, according to a UK senior police investigator. The metaverse sees various offences, including online sex crimes and virtual thefts, though no prosecutions have occurred in the UK yet, the police officer told the UK-based news outlet.
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