Police in the UK are looking into the first case of rape in the Facebook’s Metaverse virtual reality world after a young girl was ‘attacked’ in a video game. The girl, who is under 16, was left terrified after her digital character was attacked by strangers online.
Although the girl wearing the VR headset wasn’t physically hurt, officers said she felt the same emotional pain as someone who has been raped in real life sparking a debate online and a world first for police investigators.
This is thought to be the first time that police have looked into a sexual crime in virtual reality opening the door to a whole other world of policing.
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Virtual reality headsets were expected to be a popular Christmas gift, with estimates that around 15 per cent of children aged between five and ten have used one and 6 per cent use one every day.
Tech giants, led by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, have spent billions investing in the ‘metaverse’. They want to sell the chance to live a digital, fantasy life. The victim was believed to be in an online ‘room’ with lots of other users when the attack by several adult men happened.
Police leaders are now asking for new laws to deal with sexual crimes in places like this. They say police need to change their tactics to stop bad people using new technology to harm children.
The landmark case, which happened in the UK, has sparked questions about whether police should be tackling virtual offences, especially with the current backlog of real-life rape cases.
Yesterday, Ian Critchley from the UK’s National Police Chiefs’ Council warned that ‘the metaverse creates a gateway for predators to commit horrific crimes against children’.
Details of this unique virtual reality case have been kept secret to protect the child involved. A senior officer familiar with the case told the Daily Mail: ‘This child experienced psychological trauma similar to that of someone who has been physically raped.’
He added that current legislation is not set up for such cases. There have been several reported sex attacks on Horizon Worlds, a free VR online game run by Facebook’s owner, Meta. In this game, users create their own avatars and control them using a virtual reality headset.
Nina Jane Patel, a psychotherapist who studies the metaverse, has shared her ‘surreal nightmare’ of being gang raped in Horizon Venues. Donna Jones, the chairman of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, told the Mail that women and children need more protection: ‘We need to update our laws because they have not kept pace with the risks of harm that are developing from artificial intelligence and offending on platforms like the metaverse.
‘The Government needs to look at changing the law to protect women and children from harm in these virtual environments.’ A senior police officer told the Mail that sexual offending in the metaverse is now ‘rife’. However, there have been no UK prosecutions for such offences, even though police have received reports of other potential crimes including the theft of one avatar’s valuable sword.
Police think that advances in gaming have created new opportunities for cybercrime, including virtual robbery, ransomware, fraud and identity theft. But current laws probably won’t cover rape in the metaverse as sexual assault is defined in the Sexual Offences Act as physically touching another person sexually without their consent.
The nature of the metaverse also makes it hard to work out which law enforcement agency should deal with a particular incident when users and perpetrators are in different countries.
A Meta spokesperson said: ‘The kind of behaviour described has no place on our platform, which is why for all users we have an automatic protection called personal boundary, which keeps people you don’t know a few feet away from you.’
Mr Critchley added: ‘We know offenders’ tactics to groom and commit offences are constantly evolving. This is why our collective fight against predators like in this case, is essential to ensuring young people are protected online and can use technology safely without threat or fear.
‘The metaverse creates a gateway for predators to commit horrific crimes against children, crimes we know have lifelong impacts both emotionally and mentally.
‘As such, our policing approach must continually evolve to enable us to relentlessly pursue predators and safeguard victims across all online spaces.
‘The passing of the Online Safety Act is instrumental to this, and we must see much more action from tech companies to do more to make their platforms safe places.’
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