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MA ADA 2009 > articles > Virtual Rape...is it a crime or just...? _Evaluation of VR

Virtual Rape...is it a crime or just...? _Evaluation of VR

May 9, 05:31 PM · Manki Park

Even if Virtual reality technologies can be utilized for humans in relation to some positive affects of entertainment, business, communication and mental health service, it is need to monitor various its facets in terms of negative affections. Dibbell emphasized that ethical consideration plays an important role in virtual communities (1). This is because VR can be misused to gratify human beings’ being corrupted desires and violated another’s privacy and rights without moral consciousness. For example, cyber-rape or crimes in LambdaMOO (a virtual reality community) may create individual’s psychological damage like humiliation, shame or fear through avatars’ social activities (ibid).

Nevertheless, most virtual worlds, especially Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game , could be considered to have their own culture. Within a virtual world culture, the community often dictates and manage what types of practices and rules are considered freely allowed (2). That means codified rules in MMORPG communities should not be ignored and responsible for any kind of users’ actions that might be escaped by communities (ibid).

Powers argues that ‘real’ wrongs might be happened when using moral relativism in conjunction with community practices (3). For example, as mentioned earlier ‘cyber-rape’ incident described in Dibbell “Rape in Cyberspace” was wrong and did cause harm. In this ‘cyber-rape’ case, what is the most significant problem is that although there was violated in virtual communities, the ‘cyber-rape’ incident was not constituted an ethical problem and the attacker did not cause significant psychological and emotional distress on the victim as well as the other participants did not, either (ibid). This is because there was not occurred any physical harms and eventually may lead to insensibility to the feelings of other users in communities. It must be required Cyber Ethics!

As a consequence, it may result in people’s emotional confusion between real-life and virtual-life, and actions in virtual life may lead to real-life dormant consequences (4). Hence, it is inevitable to new policies and ethics of virtual world to prevent individual’s erroneous behavior.

Bibliography

(1) Dibbell, J. (1998) My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. London: Fourth Estate.

(2) Justin M. Grimes, Kenneth R. Fleischman, and Paul T. Jaeger (2009)
Virtual Guinea Pigs: Ethical implications of Human Subjects Research in
Virtual Worlds, Internationals Journal of Internet Research Ethics, Vol. 2(1) Feb

(3) Powers, T. M. (2003). Real wrongs in virtual communities. Ethics and Information Technology, 5, 191-198.

(4) Slouka, M. (1995) War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and high-tech assault on reality. New York: Basic Books.

URL References

Julian Dibbell

Cybersex Goes Mainstream

Virtual Life, Real Crime?

Reader Roundtable: “Virtual Rape” Claim Brings Belgian Police to Second Life

Virtual Rape Is Traumatic, but Is It a Crime?