Second Life Implicated in RL Child Abuse Criminal Case in Seattle

Now we may have the reason why the Lindens announced the closure of the Teen Grid so precipitiously, so that children under the age of 16 will no longer be allowed in Second Life.

A woman has been charged with abuse of a 14-year-old boy in Seattle, whom she involved in some kind of sex slave society, which she became familiar with from the online virtual world Second Life, where people are encouraged to "escape reality" and make a new life for themselves.

The group indicated -- the Libertine Society -- is apparently a real-life group, but there is no such group in Second Life by that or any similar name. Perhaps the Lindens deleted it at the first sign of trouble.

There will be lots of screaming about how this comes from Fox News, and represents, um, right-wing born-again conservative Christian Americans who hate sex...or something. We'll have to endure a good deal of edgecasing from the usual suspects that remind us that the age of consent in...Afghanistan...is lower than it is in the U.S.  We may hear about that...Hawaian...or Japanese...study that "proves" that if you let pedophiles act out online, they won't harm people in real life.

Well, too bad. This story is an important development because it shows several obvious things:

o online activity leads to offline activity

o groups with deviant culture in Second Life use them to recruit people in real life and take scenes to real life

o real-life law-enforcement is unimpressed with virtuality as a safe haven and arrests people in real life where they face real charges as in "five years in prison".

Linden Lab has long had a policy -- at least since 2006 -- that "ageplay," or the depiction of minors, or the actual presence of minors, engaged in sexualized activity is strictly prohibited and grounds for immediate deletion and expulsion.

Closing the teen grid and admitting only 16 year older is a useful thing for the Lindens to have done as this story hits Fox News, Peggy Sheehy and her wonderful work with K-12 on the TG not withstanding. She can go into Open Sim -- until enough of these types of incidents in Open Sim force Open Sim businesses to adopt the same kind of policies that Linden Lab has to, over the years, despite the howling of the "libertines".

Linden Lab will get through this scandal like others. It's not great for investors or customers to have this happen, but getting into indignant denial and fanboyish self-righteous counter-propaganda is not the answer.

The answer to the question the public will pose about this is that in fact Linden Lab has policies in place to address this type of criminal behaviour swiftly, and cooperates fully with law-enforcement officials in the U.S. and other countries where it has customers. And in fact, recently it decided to close its teen grid and will henceforth allow only 16 and older, and those ages up to 18 will be restricted to General servers with PG content.

What's good about this story is that it sheds light on the BDSM cult which needs a gigantic pushback. It helps stop the constant edgecasing of this cult with its various specious claims, and stop the main fiction of SL, that you can do anything because it's virtual and never crosses over into reality.

Of course criminality crosses anywhere, and the way to stop it is to start in virtuality, not reality.

I'm sure we'll hear raging by the BDSM gangs that they strictly enforce adults-only, that they are only virtual, etc. etc. But that's only their groups under their rules. BDSM is a hugely variegated and very diverse cultural phenomenon that violates classic rules of "safe words" and "no minors" more than it follows them. Anyone in SL knows that. The people in this movement are hugely cunning and persistent and stop at nothing to edgecase and literalize their right to be involved in this activity (Imnotgoing Sideways, the male playing the sinister BDSM girl child, is a case in point).

It's sad to see the Lindens' move to go back to the mantra of "escape from reality" backfire like this and see the carefully-created splashy new front page experience hit mainstream media not as a great development in attractiveness but as the backdrop to an isolated sex-offender case.

They had deliberately left the "Your World, Your Imagination" mantra to appeal to business and education users and be "more real". With a slump in sign-ups, they went back to the "Escape Reality" with a masked ball sort of dancing machinima on the front page to lure in new users. That's ok, because most socializers *do* want to make a character ideal in at least some little way, if not a completely different persona.

Even so, law-enforcers and the public at large are absolutely right, regardless of political affiliation, to ask all the hard questions about BDSM cults and their spread.

BDSM is not a force for civil society. In a liberal society, like racist verbal expression and pornography and lots of other unpleasant things, one is forced to accept the lifestyle's right to exist in the name of tolerance.

It's good for there to be a constant moral condemnation, however, and outrage about the spread of the cults using an online service like Second Life. BDSM cults create the context for crimes and crimes *do* occur; virtuality facilitates the criminality.

Yes, we can expect the usual editorial from Tateru Nino, a long-time ageplay apologist, telling us haughtily that this is only one case, and you can't extrapolate from the one case to assume all of SL is like this.

True. Except it did happen and was prosecuted and it is right to put in the view of the court of public opinion in the media because it's important to deter this crime from happening again.

Comments

[Ari Blackthorne]

I read the story in the New York Times. From what I got is that the case is not in Seattle but the identified group is "based" there.

Yes, I understand this is an opinion piece and not official journalism, just saying, is all.

I agree and disagree with many of your points. Not necessary to elaborate as is such the case with all people and their perspectives.

In the end: yes, sad that Second Life will become the headline because it is attached in some way... Though likely only a small part of the overall story. And yes, public ridicule is probably a good thing.

As for the "nasty" groups and gatherings and themes on the grid: BDSM I'd probably the tamest of the bunch.

[Skylar Smythe]

I personally know of a 30+ year old woman who began a sexual relationship in Second Life with a brilliant young programmer... problem was he was about 17 at the time.

Ewww... and wrong.

They were not part of any counter culture and I believe a good deal of sexual interference of minors occurs in SL. Perhaps because people feel they aren't "touching for real" that they are exempted from the same morals that govern ALL societies in this regard.

Disgusting.

Some say that a minor enjoying his/her "adult relations" is a willing victim. This attempt at plausible denial makes me sick to my stomach too.

If it was my Son... I'd hunt the woman down and make sure she served jail time.

However to hold the BDSM Community at large responsible is a mistake. It is not a cult, it is a counter culture and contains a cross section of the good, bad and the ugly. One action does not speak for an entire community.

The BDSM Community is in fact one of the SAFER counter cultures in Second Life. And the community at large is not responsible for the free choice and actions of a couple of boneheads.

Just sayin'....

xoxoxo
Skylar

[Prokofy Neva]

BDSM is not safe. It is crime. Violence and slavery are crimes. The erosion of the natural moral code and revulsion about such crimes is one of the goals of BDSM.

BDSM is indeed responsible for creating the substrate of this criminal culture. There's nothing redeeming about it.

It's not possible to find any reference to this group per se in RL or SL. On the Internet, there are several groups with similar names that organize sex parties but it's not clear that's what is referenced.

The law-enforcement officer in Leavenworth county mentioned both the group name and Second Life. So it's not hearsay.

[brinda Allen]

Well..judging from recent posts on various blogs...I'll likely catch hell for this but..........

If an adult can be manipulated to do things that aren't emotionally healthy for them... manipulated to a point of apparent mental illness... Shouldn't we as adults find a way to protect our children?

The link below is a story of what happened at one of my regions.
It's a brief synopsis of the power one person was able to wield over another, and adult.
I see people telling me that their kids are smarter than to allow the story below to happen.
I say not always...and not all kids.
I wish I had answers...heck, I'm not certain of all the questions.

http://brinda-benares.blogspot.com/2010/01/gin-had-dream.html

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Good post, Prok. Probably it would be good to note that we don't have nearly enough information about the role of SL in all of this to come to many solid conclusions about how important that connection actually is. However, given the prevalence of groups like this recruiting in SL, it is no great leap to speculate that things unfolded much as you suggest.

This is probably the most important thing you say: "What's good about this story is that it sheds light on the BDSM cult which needs a gigantic pushback."

I'm not sure what you mean by "pushback"; frankly, banning practices like BDSM might help "sanitize" SL, but mostly it will simply drive this sort of thing either underground, or elsewhere. I'd like these people where I can see them. A case in point is sexual age play, which is certainly still going on, but is now so well hidden and slippery that coming to terms with it is nigh on impossible.

There's no question in my mind that what is needed is more exposure of the existence of these sorts of behaviours in SL; most residents either don't know, or don't want to know what happens in some of these groups, or in the dungeons of Zindra, while the media has been fixated on embarrassingly dull sensationalism about bourgeois "virtual affairs," rather than focussed on the much more disturbing stuff.

With some education, we can hope that more exposure of this sort of thing will lead to a wave of revulsion through SL that will have sexual violence RP withering away, unloved and unmourned. Ultimately, it is shifts in attitudes rather than new laws that effect real change.

One final note: there is, or was as of this afternoon, at least one SL group whose name and description suggests that they MAY be the SL branch of the RL group in question. In a sense, it doesn't matter if they are: there are dozens and dozens of groups like this in SL, and some with much much nastier descriptions than this one.

[melponeme_k]

I'm waiting for the Nancy Grace expose. Once it hits there, Linden Lab/Love Machine will know what real bad publicity heat can be like. Especially when she will ask them about child avatars etc.

[Darien Caldwell]

It also doesn't matter SL was involved. It could have easily been through Skype, chatroulette, or any number of thousands of communcation mediums, at the local coffee shop, or even at church. How they met is immaterial.

The crux is this woman has major issues, what she did (if true, it's not a closed case) was horrible.

However, (and you know there was one coming), it's pretty much wrong to blame BDSM groups in SL for this. There isn't a single one suggesting or advocating any such behavior. And of course saying it's a crime is wrong. It's not Slavery, it's not a cult, it's consenting *adults* engaging in consentual actions. Period.

You don't have to like it, or agree with it, or engage in it. But yes, if you try to smear and mis-potray it, people will push back.

[Corcosman Voom]

Except for the formality of the sentencing hearing....it is a closed case. The defense would never agree to enter a no contest plea without an agreement to the sentencing terms. The likeliehood of withdrawing the no contest plea is extremely low, such pleas are entered because the evidence is convincing to the defendant and their attorney and the sentence offered by the prosecution is a better deal than they are likely to get if they go to trial.

I would think the source of all the information regarding the individual from a secret society in an on line environment is the defendant herself. Unless the defendant has chat logs or voice recordings, there wouldn't be any corroboration for her statements. The possibility exists that her story is fabricated.

For the prosecution, that doesn't matter too much. Proving the acts is crucial, motive is fairly simple to ascribe - she is a sexual predator who turned on "a young male relative". Good luck trying to defend that in front of a jury.

Hmmm, if I were the defense attorney and the only evidence of this on line encounter with an individual from a secret society was my defendant's statement.....it would never come out at trial. It's usually a disaster to put the defendant on the stand, prosecutors have a tendency to shred them.

[Prokofy Neva]

Um, you're forgetting the other source for the information: the platform provider. Linden Lab, if they turn over chat logs, which constitutes obvious corroboration. And that's a good thing.

Yes, BDSM is to blame for this and other stories. Becauase it's a cult that glorifies violence and slavery and spreads it.

It's not about "banning BDSM" which is an overbroad concept that would be hard to ban and unnecessarily intrusive to ban. It's about simply taking up each criminal act -- slavery, coercion, violence, harm, etc. The defense of "consent' hasn't ever been accepted by U.S. or European courts in BDSM cases.

The idea that "SL isn't to blame because it could have been Chatrolette" is silly amoral geekism. Platforms facilitate amoral and criminal acts and are accessories. If they weren't potential accessories, LL wouldn't have policies and wouldn't cooperate with law-enforcers instantly, which they've always done. You don't hear the Lindens lawyering up and edgecasing in the leftwing press with the ACLU that their rights are violated. No.

The idea that BDSM groups "don't advocate such behaviour" is silly. Of course they do. They advocate coercion, slavery, violence, deception all the time. If they technically have some policy against spreading their cult to minors, it's violated constantly because their cult is more important their the rule of law to them.

I don't have to reach very far to "smear" this cult. The cult practitioners themselves have ample stories about how they were recruited as minors.