Rape crisis Scotland

Pornographic sites depicting the rape and torture of women are commonplace, extreme and wholly unregulated within Second Life. Second Life, and other virtual worlds, allow the fantasy of pornography to be taken one step further by allowing users to actively participate in that fantasy. It also provides a community of other like minded people who validate and re-enforce that their fantasy is OK.

An example of this is a site called Sandor Boarding School, “Every year between four and eight senior girls are selected, after being watched for their entire time at the School, for their beauty and their susceptibility to the Sandor’s special training regime,” reads the site. “At graduation, these girls, privileged, beautiful, trained to accept the most debasing, humiliating sexual abuse, are accepted at small, prestigious colleges. There, they are brought into service as a specialty, a rarity, the daughters of the powerful, crawling, groveling, slaves for members of the Satin Circle. Some even travel through Europe, spending a year in sexual slavery.”

With the increasing use of Second Life by commercial companies and educational institutions, it is easy for Second Life users to stumble across this material.This includes young people, for while Second Life is supposed to be restricted to users aged over eighteen – with its sister site Teen Second Life being targeted at users aged between thirteen and eighteen – the reality is that it is impossible to restrict entry to either site and very difficult to know exactly who is participating, or the real identity underlying any avatar.

Awareness

Rape Crisis Scotland – a voluntary organisation working to raise awareness of issues relating to sexual violence – is preparing to launch a site on Second Life, to raise awareness of its campaign to Second Life dwellers.

Second Life now has over 16 million registered users, and offers the potential to reach an international audience, with campaigning organisations such as Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS) increasingly making use of new technology to reach wider audiences.

The Rape Crisis Scotland site will be based within ‘non-profit commons’, an area within Second Life which hosts over 60 non-profit organisations on its islands. The Nonprofit Commons project, managed by TechSoup Global, is a virtual community of practice for non-profits to explore the opportunities and benefits of Second Life.

The development of the RCS Second Life site follows on from related developments within Rape Crisis Scotland, with the organisation considering how it can use new media and social networking sites to assist in its awareness raising work.

In the recent Scotland-wide public awareness campaign on rape – ‘this is not an invitation to rape me’ – RCS established a facebook group for the campaign, which, at time of writing, has 1,632 members. The group allows people to join to show support for the campaign, debate the issues it raises and invite others to join to promote awareness of the campaign. RCS also established an interactive campaign website, which in a six week period from the campaign launch in October 2008 attracted over 23,208 unique visitors. The interactive element of the website – which allows people to post comments on the campaign – has been well used, with over a thousand comments being posted to date.

Second Life provides a further forum for the organisation to raise awareness of issues relating to sexual violence, and one which enables it to take a participatory and interactive approach.

The RCS site is primarily intended to be an awareness raising tool, rather than the provision of a direct support service. It will be used to highlight both the ‘this is not an invitation to rape me’ campaign, as well as more general issues around rape and sexual assault. It will have a number of interactive elements, including a mediaplayer which can be used to play videos / films, for example to generate discussion at any events organised within Second Life. The media player will also be used to display website content and presentations.

Feedback

RCS has also set up a poll on sexual violence, which will be used to gather views on relevant issues. The site has a postbox and notice boards, meaning that people will be able to post views, give feedback and post their own writing and stories. Information kiosks within the site will also give information on the campaign. Computer stations throughout the site will give links to international support services for people who have experienced sexual violence – although the site will be run by a Scottish organisation, the audience will be international – and the resource library within the site will provide support information, reading materials, and links to relevant blogs and articles.

Images from the ‘this is not an invitation to rape me’ campaign will be displayed prominently throughout the site, and will be accompanied by links to the campaign website and facebook group. There will also be an RSS news reader within the site which is set up with links to international news on violence against women.

In addition to the awareness raising opportunities Second Life offers, a further reason for Rape Crisis Scotland deciding to set up a site on Second Life was to provide a counterpoint to the significant amount of material on Second Life which depicts the abuse of women as a form of entertainment. Areas like the Sandor Boarding School, for example.

The development of virtual worlds such as Second Life provide significant challenges for those fighting violence against women, as it opens up whole new arenas for depictions of abuse, arenas which are almost wholly unregulated. At the same time, however, it offers groups like Rape Crisis Scotland opportunities to engage with a wide audience in challenging the acceptability of violence against women. This is the main purpose of the new site – to give a clear message to a wide audience that rape is never acceptable.