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.
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 guess you’d have a point if this didn’t really happen.
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
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!
VR is immersive, but it isn’t that immersive, especially when it comes to user feedback
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?
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.
The amount of murder I have done in gaming. I’m going away for a long time boys💀
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
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?
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.
What a joke.
Real crimes are being compared to vr “crimes”. Next will be thought crimes.
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.
Are you fucking kidding me?
They took cops off of real cases to work a VIRTUAL ASSAULT in a video game. (just harassment, not assault btw)
JFC I hope we fucking get nuked soon. We don’t deserve to live.
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I just feel like this would set a negative precedent for interactions in online games. Idk tho, not a lawyer.
Oh for fucks sake
