A woman has said she was virtually “gang raped” in the Metaverse and that it felt like real life.
Nina Jane Patel, the vice president of research for a rival metaverse company, claims she was “verbally and sexually harassed” and even “virtually gang raped” by a group of men within 60 seconds of logging into “Horizon Venues”, a VR world owned by Meta (formerly Facebook).
Horizon Worlds allows you to meet friends and strangers in a virtual world, where you have a digital avatar version of your body that moves as you do.
Though it allows you to chat to people, play games, and be immersed in the experience, it also has a dark side, as Patel’s experience shows.
Narrating her experience, Patel said: “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 added that she was “not accustomed to be spoken to in such derogatory ways, maybe back in 1996, but certainly not in 2021.”
