The metaverse of harassment and hate

GROPING | GANG RAPE | SEXUAL HARASSMENT | RACIST COMMENTS

- Dharitri Ganguly and Saptaparna Biswas

Sixty seconds is all it took for re-searcher Nina Jane Patel’s metaverse avatar to be ‘groped aggressively, verbally and sexually vharassed’. Nina, a movement psychotherapist and a metaverse researcher at Kabuni, entered a social and live events venue on the platform Horizon Worlds to study user behaviour on the metaverse. She wrote about her horrifying experience of getting virtually gang raped by male avatars, in a blog post. “Within 60 seconds of joining — I was verbally and sexually harassed — 3–4 male avatars, with male voices, essentially, but virtually gang raped my avatar and took photos — as I tried to get away, they yelled — “don’t pretend you didn’t love it” and “go rub yourself off to the photo,” she wrote.

In a recent incident, a 21-year-old unnamed researcher who works for non-profit advocacy organisation SumOfUs, reported that her metaverse avatar was sexually assaulted in a virtual room on the same platform, which currently boasts of 300,000 users. “The researcher was led into a private room at a party where she was raped by a user who kept telling her to turn around so he could do it from behind while users outside the window could see – all while another user in the room watched and passed around a vodka bottle,” states the report titled ‘Metaverse: another cesspool of toxic content’.

Similarly, when gamer Chanelle Siggens logged on the virtual reality game on the metaverse called Population One, she was approached by a player, in the virtual lobby of the game, who simulated groping and ejaculating onto her avatar.