New Delhi: In the first case of its kind, the British Police has initiated an investigation into a virtual "gangrape" of a 16-year-old girl in a metaverse game. According to the police, the virtual reality avatar (VR) or an animated representation of the minor girl was "gang-raped" by several strangers online, the Daily Mail reported.
According to the report, the victim was said to be wearing a virtual reality headset when she was "gang-raped" during the "immersive" game. Citing police sources, the report further stated that the girl was not physically injured but she suffered the emotional and psychological trauma akin to someone raped in the real world.
“There is an emotional and psychological impact on the victim that is longer-term than any physical injuries,” a senior police official told Daily Mail.
However, the UK authorities fear that it might be impossible to prosecute the case under the existing legislation, which define sexual assault as physical touching in a sexual manner against the victim’s consent.
According to the report, the probe has also raised questions on whether the police should be using their time and limited resources to investigate metaverse crimes when there’s a substantial backlog of in-person rape cases.
However, UK Home Secretary James Cleverly defended the virtual reality rape investigation claiming that the child has gone through "sexual trauma".
“I know it is easy to dismiss this as being not real, but the whole point of these virtual environments is they are incredibly immersive. It's also worth realizing that somebody willing to put a child through a trauma like that digitally may well be someone that could go on to do terrible things in the physical realm,” Cleverley told news outlet LBC.
“It will have had a very significant psychological effect and we should be very, very careful about being dismissive of this,” he added.