101: Will Bobba for Furni

[Archon]

Better to just consign a sexist term to the dustbin of history, and start over with a term that recognizes this as a crime of power and violence, such as 'sexual assault,' right?

There's growing debate as to whether rape really is "a crime of power and violence". While rape as a cultural phenomenon where men exercise power over women has been the accepted social scientific model, evolutionary biology sees rape as a distinct, sexually motivated act: "Rape not only appears to occur in all known cultures, but in a wide variety of other species where there is certainly no cultural encouragement of such behavior." See The Evolutionary Biology of Rape [http://www.aec.at/festival2000/texte/randy_thornhill_e.htm].

I've read evolutionary biology quite closely and found its arguments persuasive; others have found it less so (and of course some don't even accept the evidence of evolution itself, let alone evolution as having an impact on human behavior). Given we can't achieve consensus on what rape is in real life, all the more unlikely we can establish broadly accepted views on what constitutes virtual rape.

For the record, though, I'd call what happened online far closer to harassment than rape.

 

[Echolocating]

There's obviously a separation between virtual and real assault, but the lines blur on the emotional side of the argument. It's unfortunate that a girl was emotionally raped while online. For her, it was a very real emotional experience. It's also very unfortunate that she didn't have the presence of mind to turn off her computer and disconnect herself from the situation.

I don't have any hesitation siding with a victimized child, for obvious reasons, but when an adult is victimized, I have a hard time. It's difficult to believe that an adult's inability to disconnect from a virtual world isn't by choice (or that they don't have to take responsibility for their inaction). However, if my logic is wrong, then I'm more concerned about the adult victim's mental health. Will MMO addiction become a public health concern?

 

[Bongo Bill]

Bungle is obviously the bad guy here, but I can't help but wonder why legba did not employ this option in the entire course of the incident, if it bothered her that much.

So did Philip Zimbardo, so he conducted Stockholm [http://www.prisonexp.org/] wound up bonding with their captors.

If you are wondering why people don't fight like hell or run from their captors sometimes, I'd say the best thing to do is to go look at what the social sciences have to say about how normal, mentally fit people behave in abnormal situations, rather than just try and reason it out from first principles like some medieval churchman, right? Isn't science always better for understanding why things in the world happen the way they do than just contemplating our own navels to come up with explanations? Like...the medieval churchman Roger Bacon suggested? :-D

The cases you've described aren't any more applicable than the philosopher. Stockholm Syndrome is related to what happens after the crime - not to attempts to prevent it. Patti Hearst didn't have a magic escape key. In the real world, when it is even possible, running away from a threatening situation entails the likelihood of the threatening situation becoming realized, often in the form of violence. There is no comparison. No external factor can prevent a person from abandoning a virtual situation at no cost, whereas the details that make your cases unique are the fact that such preventative factors exit. There is no data about situations with a magic escape key. Which, wouldn't you know it, is why I was wondering.

If we're looking for applicable studies, we might find more value in the studies discussing what makes a person more or less likely to intervene on behalf of a stranger in a public place. They're still substantially different, but they have at least one important thing in common: it's trivially easy to walk away from.

 

[Bongo Bill]

If we're looking for applicable studies, we might find more value in the studies discussing what makes a person more or less likely to intervene on behalf of a stranger in a public place. They're still substantially different, but they have at least one important thing in common: it's trivially easy to walk away from.

Okay! Whatever floats your boat then, as far as studies go.

However much we may disagree on the applicability of my specific examples, am I right that you agree with me that (1) social science is the way to go, and (2) the studies made in the social sciences can diverge substantially in the conclusions they lead to from the conclusions we come to in just thinking about what the 'average' person would do, with all the research in our heads?

We're in agreement, but I wouldn't dismiss the philosophical approach outright.

 

[FunkyJ]

If it sounds like I'm saying "think about the children" then perhaps I am. But not in the way you suggest. Do you have children? If yes, then think about them. Often. If no, then what do you care anyway? Be a good person, go about your business and try not to break any traffic laws.

I won't break any traffic laws... I don't drive - I'm thinking about the children

My issue is that when people think of the children, they often don't.

So, when I read stories like this that promote caution or even fear, I get a little worried - not so much about what you're saying: you are a gamer writing in a game magazine after all - but the way this will be taken by mainstream media.

Sure, the Rape in Cyberspace happened years ago, but would that matter to mainstream news?

I follow the news closely, and the amount of factual errors deliberately made to sell a news story is phenomenal.

Case in point: The Great Global Warming Swindle documentary. A Scientist was interviewed for this show, and they cut up and re-arranged what he said so much he had to issue a press report refuting his own claims! Yet this has been shown around the world, and taken by some mainstream media and used as 'proof' that global warming isn't man made.

Or The Polar Bear Knut. Originally written by a right wing tabloid and grabbed by the AAP news feed, this story went around the world, and animal rights activists were accused of wanting to kill baby bears.

The thing was, they were totally taken out of context by the original source, and that was never fact checked until Mediawatch did a bit of exploring (link [http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1887892.htm])

My point is what you're writing could be picked up by the media and twisted to suit it's own agenda. The way you're writing it means it can be easily used to support their agenda.

 

[Echolocating]

This discussion has taken some interesting turns, but since Bill and Cheeze both agree that Cheeze is right about them both being right about the importance of social science and some other point that confuses me, I'd like to jump back a bit to something that may have been missed. ;-)

We would not allow children to play unsupervised in a metro area playground. We should not let them do so online. There is no difference, for all practical purposes. We've seen a generation of children grow up in America with televisions as babysitters and now these children are adults with children of their own. It's understandable that they assume the internet is just as safe an attention-keeper for their children, but it is not. It's far, far more dangerous.

Thank you for making that point. To elaborate a little further, a large part of parenting is educating your children. When my little buckaroo decides to play online, I'll make sure he knows that the off switch is always there. I'll probably play along side him online too. I may even ask him about his guild and online friends or what he did in the game that day. I'll become active in his life.

My father once handled a very touchy situation with my sister a while back, when she was a young teenager. There was a guy who was 5 years older than her, out of school, that she was interested in... in the real world. My father had to make a very difficult decision. He sat her down and he told her the reason why an older guy would be interested in a young girl. Of course, she didn't believe him. He told her if the guy tried to do anything that they discussed, she was to run away. Fortunately, she did end up running away from the guy before any serious harm came. She also thanked my father.

Had my father told her simply to not see the guy, she would have anyway... and probably in a dangerously defiant manner. Education is key, people. Parental ignorance is not an excuse.

I don't blame a young child for being virtually violated; I blame the perpetrator. However, the parents must take responsibility for educating and protecting their children... and I think that's the story we don't hear enough about in the news.

"Tonight at 9, neglectful parents to blame for country's woes." ;-)

 

[Archon]

See though, they never use the term 'rape' in what you linked to in the sense of being a crime. They state: "There is no connection here between what is biological or naturally selected and what is morally right or wrong. To assume a connection is to commit what is called the naturalistic fallacy" (p. 5-6)." I wouldn't call that a debate over the *crime* of rape, just the *phenomenon* of rape.

I'm sure you're familiar with the difference between mala prohibita and mala in se. Rape isn't a crime that was created because our legislatures passed a statute prohibiting it. The phenomenon of rape is mala in se, as is the phenomenon of murder. And I am discussing what causes that phenomenon.

And I think your argument here is a bit moot, because virtual rape is obviously not the criminal act of rape as defined in any statute, so the only way it could be rape is phenomenologically.

That doesn't mean culture isn't *sufficient* to cause rape; that only means it's not *necessary*. Big difference, right? Even they admit that culture and its messages of power and violence "plays a major role in the cause of rape" without going into just *how* major it is, or even how major it is in modern societies, which is what we really care about.

You don't have any proof that culture is sufficient to cause rape, do you? If you do, I'm sure the evolutionary biology and social science communities would be fascinated to hear of it.

I simply read their statement as representing good science: They aren't claiming to prove more than they have evidence for. The argument about the full extent to which genes, environment, or "free will" are responsible for particular behavioral outcomes has yet to be settled.

And didn't you find it a little disingenuous how they start talking so much about 'environment' and avoiding the word 'culture'? Or that they talk about how "[t]he learning experiences that are suggested by recent research to influence men's rape proneness offer promise for reducing rape. The number of boys raised under conditions of poverty in industrial societies could be greatly reduced by taxation policies that lower wealth inequalities, coupled with more taxation revenues being directed at socially disfranchised families."

I don't find that disingenuous at all. Evolution provides us with drives - drives to survive and reproduce. The behaviors in which those drives manifest is going to be environmentally determined. If I'm hungry, I go to McDonalds. If my hunter-gatherer ancestor was hungry, he scrounged for berries. Same drive, different behavior.

There is considerable evidence across disparate fields (sociology, criminology, psychology) that young men at the bottom rung of their culture are more likely to commit crimes. Evolutionary biology explains this by suggesting males represent an evolutionary gamble: They can produce no children, or a virtually unlimited number. Women are evolutionarily the more conservative bet. As a result, men who see themselves as having very limited opportunities for reproduction are driven to desperate deeds - deeds of honor (or horror) in war, acts of greatness, crimes of rape. This is all explained in depth in, for instance, Steve Pinker's works, or The Mating Mind.

You are free to disagree with evolutionary biology - it is hardly without its critics - but to suggest that its scientists are disingenuous without considering the full explanatory value of the theory is unfair.

You don't see me suggesting that feminist social scientist are being disingenuous when they suggest rape is a crime of power so that they can further a social movement to empower women.

Is it just me, or isn't the definition of "disenfranchisement" something like 'a lack of power'? I mean, let me get this straight: they're saying that rape isn't a crime of power. However, empowering people who feel they have no power makes them much less prone to commit rape? WTF? RTFM? BBQ!

See above. It makes complete sense.

Also, to me, calling something 'rape' from a biological scientific experiment is...well, *that's* what I would call sensationalist. I mean, doesn't that make about as much sense as calling the eating of fertilized eggs by predators by the term 'abortion'? Or the actions of parasites a form of 'piracy'? [/emote]

When lifelong pair-bonded birds get a little avian love on the side, biologists call that "adultery". They aren't being sensationalist, they are using a term that has meaning for the behavior described.

The entire notion of evolutionary psychology is that much of human behavior is really animal behavior. If that's sensationalist to you, then so be it. Certainly evolution itself was once considered sensationalist, what with its notions of humans evolving from primates and all.

Finally, didn't you have a problem with this line: "We also argue that the best way to obtain a better understanding of the role of culture in the cause of human rape is to approach the subject from the only generally accepted scientific explanation of the behavior of living things: Darwinian evolution by natural selection."

Man alive!, Freud, Jung, Maslow, James, Durkheim, Zimbardo...none of them gave us 'generally accepted scientific explanations of the behavior of living things'! Who knew! :-D

I have already granted on several occasions that evolutionary psychology is a contentious field. But the reason it has strength at all is because evolution is not contentious (outside of US creationist debates, anyway).

Freud, Jung, et. al don't provide generally accepted scientific explanations of the behavior of all living things. Evolution does. Psychology provides a descriptive framework for diagnosing mental illness in humans, and several competing theories of behavior (including psychoanalytic theories, cognitive-behavioral, and dynamic) but none of its theories have the gnerally accepted scientific explanations that evolution do.

Ask a random sample of scientists if they believe the theory of evolution provides an explanation for animal behavior and around 90% will say "yes". Ask the same pool if they believe Freud's theories, or Skinner's, do the same, and I bet a much tinier percentage will say yes. Even among psychology, its scientists can't decide if there is room for the role of the unconscious, for instance, or whether the best treatments are cognitive, operant, analytic, or chemical.

 

[Russ Pitts]

Right. Now that we've (hopefully) put the "what is rape" debate to bed, allow me to jump back to one of the *other* discussions I was hoping to provoke with this article:

Education is key, people. Parental ignorance is not an excuse.

Exactly. The instances of rape/harassment/solicitation described in the article are intended to paint a picture of what's possible. The full social, legal and moral ramifications of the events notwithstanding, they actually happened. To real people, with real feelings and real lives. That the events described happened (mostly) online, in a virtual environment, is irrelevant; they happened, and people were effected. Mostly adult people who knew what they were getting into and why, but they did happen. This suggests that events like those described will continue to happen and will increase in frequency in some correlation with the increase in the amount of our personal business we conduct online. That we haven't heard about more instances of events like tehse is merely a function of relative ignorance on the part of those (like me) who do the reporting. I suspect that the more we dig, the more we'll find (like I did).

What this also suggests is that we can expect a great many new and interesting social issues to come out of our increased interaction with each other online. If we here in a website devoted to game issues are all aflutter over whether or not the events described in Dibbel's fantastically written article constitute rape, then imagine how goofy the courts are going to get over the issue when we start seeing the inevitable lawsuits.

I'm not trying to be an alarmist, but the flood is imminent. I recently participated in an online debate [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/71164-Xfire-Censorship-Debate-Transcript] with California Senator Leeland Yee and Hal Halpin of the ECA (among others) and the focus of that debate was mainly how to conduct effective age-restriction measure in offline games, i.e. ESRB et al. When the moderator asked the esteemed panel what they thought of the issue of age restrictions in online, virtual worlds, there was a near complete silence - they weren't even thinking about it. Because virtual worlds, in spite of their having existed for over a decade, are still not anywhere near the mainstream radar. Second Life is changing that, for better or worse, and we're now entering a time not unlike the early nineties when the internet was relatively well known and understood by a great many people, but seriously underreported by the mainstream.

What we're talking about with worlds like Habbo and Audition goes far deeper than paranoia over what could happen in a chat room. These are worlds created to make children feel safe and secure, and play with abandon. And children in these game worlds do what children do everywhere: explore and test boundaries. This is what children are supposed to do, but if we're not there with them to show them exactly where those boundaries lie, then we have only ourselves to blame for what happens next.

The story of Jung Na-yung and Audition shows how easy it is to game these systems for illicit purposes, and what can happen when someone feels as if they're in a safe, trusting environment, and gets taken advantage of. In Habbo Hotel, where children regularly mimic Epic Slut and "bobba for furni" we're seeing something else entirely; something potentially far more sinister. One wouldn't necessarily expect a child would need to be told that soliciting sex for goods and services is a bad thing, but then again, if we learned few here on the forum can't even agree on whether virtual assault is indeed rape, then how can we expect a child to understand why cybering for virtual loot is over the line?

 

[Joe]

Interesting corollary to the online predator angle, from Cory "DRMDRMDRM" Doctorow over at Boing Boing: Online Predators aren't tricking kids, they're exploiting teenagers [http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/13/sexual_predators_onl.html].

And now I'll quote a quote, because I'm just so meta:

But actually, the research in the cases that we?ve gleaned from actual law enforcement files, for example, suggests a different reality for these crimes. So first fact is that the predominant online sex crime victims are not young children. They are teenagers. There?s almost no victims in the sample that we collected from ? a representative sample of law enforcement cases that involved the child under the age of 13.

In the predominant sex crime scenario, doesn?t involve violence, stranger molesters posing online as other children in order to set up an abduction or assault. Only five percent of these cases actually involved violence. Only three percent involved an abduction. It?s also interesting that deception does not seem to be a major factor.

 

[Russ Pitts]

That's a great link Joe, and supports a great deal of what's on my mind right now.

It's not necessarily that we've got a wave of potential abuse or victimization cases on the horizon, it's that we're seeing the evolution of an entirely new order of social interaction. I suppose it's disingenuous of me to suggest this may be a "problem" per se, but I do think it's going to come as a surprise to a great many people just what all is happening online, who's doing it and why - and that the awakening will be brutal and destructive.

 

[Bongo Bill]

We're in agreement, but I wouldn't dismiss the philosophical approach outright.

I don't know--I guess I don't see the value in a philosophical approach to an empirical question. And 'how will the average person act under these circumstances' seems like about as empirical a question as one can ask.

I guess we have a misunderstanding, then, because the question I was asking was 'why did this person act the way she did under these circumstances.'

 

[Russ Pitts]

This actually got me thinking of a game that's considered totally family friendly: Guitar Hero. That's another game that seems to break the barrier between real and virtual by tapping into a higher order psychological need. If better music played just because I pushed buttons on a controller to overcome obstacles or puzzles in a game, it would just be a game. When people talk about playing Guitar Hero, though, they seem to be experiencing something along the lines of what real-live musicians do and are getting some of the same satisfaction.

That's a good point, Cheeze. I've often felt like Guitar Hero was little more than an overly complex Pavlov trigger, designed to elicit a correct response (in this case, pressing buttons in sequence) by providing aural and psychological stimuli (better music, fantasy reward, etc). I'm sure someone with the appropriate leanings could turn such a thing into a torture or manipulation device, but it sure does make for good fun.

 

[Nordstrom]

Cheeze Pavilion,

First, you ask people to be scientific. Someone cites a scientifically researched book. You discard it with hand-waving arguments. Then you suggest people be more scientific. I don't get it. Yes, the book talks about power, but it attempts to be more detailed and objective by talking about drives for sex and other quantifiable metrics. That's how science works.

That said, I don't think that your ideas of power and the book's ideas about evolutionary selection are mutually exclusive. Try reading the page about the book again without trying to shoehorn everything into a power paradigm.

Karl