Evicting Child Avatars from Brown

Oh, geez, I better post this story about the ageplayers in Brown because the assholes are piling up in the comments second-guessing my very clear-cut story (that merely had some complications as you will see) -- and there's an imposter there (the comment starting with "Dear," under the pictures of the kids in the post below) claiming that I will "cease renting" if Linden Lab doesn't prosecute this particular case. Oh, bleh. That's not true.

Here's the story. This fellow rented from me in Brown months ago -- perhaps 6 or 8 months, I don't recall. He was very busy for a time building his own home-made house from scratch, which was amateurish but intense, with lots of textures and particles and stuff -- the usual newbie dance. He then went around and built more houses for some of his friends, whom he brought to the sim to rent. They all seemed to be normal enough and didn't warrant a second glance.

Brown is a PG sim. And none of these people seemed to be doing anything that was non-PG inside or outside their house. There's actually no Linden law that says you can't be discretely non-PG in a PG sim as long as you are inside your house. Obviously, I'm never going to be policing this, and I don't care if people "keep it inside".

But these houses and objects all seemed benign, they didn't even have pose balls, they had dance floors and sculptures and all kinds of junk.

This tenant then became something of a pest, as he would have these friends come over, they'd put out prims by joining the group, but then he couldn't clean up the mess, as the prims were group-set. So I would be called again and again to come and clean up messes of prims. I told him to knock it off and make his friends pick up their damn prims or they would not be welcome.

At this point it was just junk -- nothing "actionable" at all -- stupid particle thingies or dance floors or glowing junk, whatever.

I then got a complaint from a next-door neighbour, a fellow tenant renting from me on the sim as well. He said that this tenant who was the big builder with the dance floor was bothering him, coming on his land, and undoing his name in the ban list (as one resident in my rentals can do to another if they both have resident powers, although if they persist in that I evict the one bothering the other.)

So I IM'd the guy and told him to knock it off. At this point he was just a low-level nuisance -- somebody who just created trouble tickets now and then, but he seemed basically alright.

But then this next-door neighbour complained to me that this tenant was ageplaying. I didn't know if he was just adding that on to up the ante and get rid of a guy he found basically a nuisance -- with a big square box with glowing stuff that was smack on the property edges -- or what was up.

I flew out there and looked around and all I saw was one short female avatar who was AFK. Contrary to what some might think, I'm not going to evict people merely for being child avatars, and even just short avatars that look liked edge-casers. They have to be violating the rules. I don't have a condition against child avatars, but I have never known a single child avatar not to cause trouble, ever. Every single child avatar I've ever had in my rentals -- and I've had numerous child avatars -- has been trouble. They either cause all kinds of problems with overprimming and griefing, or they do ageplay. I almost inevitably evict them or ask them to leave. Indeed, my antipathy to child avatars in Second Life is grounded in a thorough, repeated, extensive, field experience of them in my rentals, absent a policy against them. I've never known it to be otherwise.

Even somebody who turned out to be a child avatar who I didn't even realize was one would stay happily in my rentals, would get lots of help from me and appreciation of her creations, but then pout because she thought I was anti-child-avatar and felt she had to move out (after reading something I wrote, even after she had been there a year or more -- see what I mean? Trouble every time.)

So if I see a female avatar who is merely short -- very petite and diminuitive but with adult features -- I have no reason to report anything.

So this tenant complaining about his neighbour persists with me. He then comes back to me and tells me another person, a friend of his, has caught this tenant unmistakeably ageplaying, and had the picture, and he would get him to send it to me.

I wasn't happy to have any picture like that sent into my inventory, so I urged him and the friend to abuse-report the tenant and if the friend could reach me, I'd listen to his complaint and see if it involved more than just this short female adult avatar.

During this time -- for some weeks -- I had a terrible computer set up with terrible visibility and no mobility so I didn't think I could do much with it. At one point I went around to the houses the people in this friend's group were renting, and all I could see was a "family portrait," i.e. two adult avatars with a third avatar playing their child. Such "families" are very common in SL and doesn't necessarily constitute ageplay. I've seen LOTS of them without any ageplay related to it, so it was not grounds for prosecution.

Now, mind you, Brown is also the location of Imnotgoing Sideways -- he deliberately moved into Brown to heckle me, so I was mindful that any or all of these incidents might be related to him. I didn't see him on the sim or any activity in his parcels but with all the sims I have to watch I couldn't keep going there to check.

I removed the ban powers from the tenant so that he couldn't remove himself from the list, I IM'd him and said I'd had repeated complaints he was removing himself from ban and harassing people, he could not have his ban powers back unless I had assurance the problems would stop. He assured me they would. I waited a few days and restored his ban powers.

Then, three things happened all at once that clinched the complaint for me.

First, I saw someone who had moved into Brown recently refund. I didn't know the person or look at their profile. I sent her a routine message I send all people who refund asking if they had problems, i.e. prims returning, because new people can't always understand the group join issues. This person then IM'd me back, and she was a child avatar -- in fact, a baby and toddler judging from her pictures of herself on her profile. She complained bitterly that she had to move because the tenant who had generated all the complaints was asking her to have sex all the time and she didn't want to He was also having sex with "too many girls," she said.

Uh-oh -- here was a child avatar confirming that a) this tenant was demanding sex from her she was tired of giving, apparently, and b) was having sex with her girlfriends, who were kids, too. I looked at their profiles now, they were all child avatars and all in a child avatar group that purported to be innocuous.

I questioned her about whether this tenant did ageplay. She said "no" -- but that was ridiculous, because she had just explained unmistakeably that he had. When the child avatar comes and complains to you about someone that they were hitting them up for sex all the time, geez, that's pretty obvious. I could see that these contradictions were ones that she had somehow successfully kept apart in her own tiny mind.

When I pointed out that she had a baby picture, she said "oh, that's my old picture. I growed up." Sigh.

This by itself was perhaps not unmistakeable proof, because there wasn't a smoking gun, and perhaps you could believe the story that this avatar "growed up" from the baby and toddler stages and became even an adult. Stranger things have happened in Second Life.

Even so, I felt that it was all just too creepy -- all these child avatars with adult relationships and activities. I IM'd the tenant, I told him I was done, and he had to refund and that was it. I swept them all out -- there was one person for whom he had built a house, but since she didn't seem to be related to the group and said she wasn't his friend or involved with him, I left her, while ejecting the others. That was that.

Then two other things happened that made it all pretty clear.

Not long after I finished dealing with this bitter baby who was being hit on and the eviction,  suddenly the picture came in from the tenant's friend -- he had reached him and asked him to send it and I had finally logged on. Ugh, it was very graphically a picture of an adult male avatar and a female child avatar. I wish I could chlorox my eyeballs. It was a very disturbing picture that was unmistakeably what it was, and it was the tenant, and it was his house. But the picture didn't have name tags over the avatars. The photo didn't capture them or they had their name tags turned off. The tenant and his friend and I all recognized the people and the unmistakeable garish house. But there were no nametags.  The house was now returned; nobody in the group was left on the sim; the picture could be related to anyone -- it wasn't clear it could be tied to my tenant although the sim name was stamped on it automatically.

Then, a final thing happened which made it even more unmistakeable. The tenant who lived next door to the problem tenant and had complained about him had IM'd me and asked me urgently to "remove the prims' of this now ex-tenant and his friends -- he had complained about prim litter from them before so I had it on my "to-do" list. But I was having trouble even seeing and moving with a crappy computer set up, so it just stayed on the list without action for a day or so -- I thought it was just a few scattered plywood cubes or something when he said "prims".

Finally I managed to get logged on and went to remove the prims. When I lit them up on the menu, I saw why he was anxious to get rid of them --what had happened was that one of the child avatars had left a bed with sex poses right in his house -- it was just too creepy.

I went around the sim and then I found that in each and every house of every other tenant -- the remaining long-term tenants who weren't associated with the ones evicted -- this avatar had gone around and left her bed and her poses -- on roofs, on landings, inside houses -- everywhere. It was as if to say "Look at me, I'm a child avatar with a sex bed." I'd never see anything so blatant and weird.

My first thought was to wonder if it was some kind of set-up -- somebody was taking advantage of my lagging ability to log on and was putting this around expressly to create trouble and get me somehow abuse reported as the land owner.

I wondered if this was even Imnotgoing at work -- although to be honest, it didn't seem to be. The person in question was in the same child group as the others who had been with the tenant, and was their girlfriend, showing up in their pictures, etc.

Well, I returned the whole mess, abuse reported the ones for which I could actually find something to say -- the tenant, the bed owner, the one who had complained about being hit on.

Knowing how abuse reports "go nowhere," I wrote the whole thing up on a card and gave it to a responsible Linden asking them to forward it appropriately.

Unfortunately, precisely because prims were returned and the pictures had no name tags the Lindens perhaps couldn't do much with this. Or maybe they are still investigating. The people are still in the people list. It's possible they stopped their activity after fearing they'd now be caught.

Making wrongful accusations against people is a serious offense. And that's why I'm not naming names precisely because I myself don't have proof when the picture isn't one I took and has no names.  Furthermore, somebody putting out sex beds all over the roofs and porches of houses in a PG sim is weird and likely an offense, but if you can't show that they were a child avatar while doing this, you might not have a case. You could only protest it in terms of inappropriate content for PG.

And I noticed that's just how these avatars rolled. Some had child pictures as their profile; some didn't. Some would display themselves as children on their picks but put themselves as adults in-world. They clearly shifted, and that was part of how they were able to keep it all off their conscience, I guess. That made it hard to make an unmistakeable complaint about them. And that's deliberate.

I have to go by my instincts on this. I never have trouble naming names on something I feel I have evidence about, as we don't have recourse for justice in SL. In this case, while I felt we had evidence, I myself didn't gather it and only had indirect accounts. All I could do was evice them from my own rentals because I thought there were just too many red flags, and then turn it over to the Lindens.

As I said -- child avatars, a nasty business.

Comments

[melponeme_k]

Anytime I've seen a child avatar, they were harassing everyone around them with that crazy baby talk and pretending to be lost or abandoned. I can count on my hands the ones I've seen who minded their own business and quietly shopped or were sight seeing.

Real children and young adults are all concerned with being taken as an equal with adults. Children want autonomy, that is the goal of childhood...to gain equality. I remember hating being patronized by adults as a child.

These people pretending to be children in SL seem to want the opposite of real children. That is why it is disturbing.

I wouldn't say that people who appear short in SL are all secret children. But do some hide behind it? Yeah, most likely.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

How interesting that after all this time not one comment was posted. :P

[Ahab Qvetcher]

I noticed that too Ann Otoole

Funny how once the evidence appears the critics are silenced.

Maybe Prokofy is right?

[Gisele]

I have to say that I have rarely met a child avatar who didn't turn out to be some damaged person who was trying to compensate for other issues. In and of itself, that's not some horrible crime.

It's just that the majority of them seem to want to shove their age-play "lifestyle" into other peoples' faces, like that creep imnotgoing, and this child avie who scattered the sex-beds around Prok's rentals in Brown...

I have a feeling that at least some of these low-lifes were raised in such a permissive environment that they essentially know no boundaries.

[ichabod Antfarm]

In his follow-up to this post, Prok was calm and measured in his judgement. This does not follow a script acceptable to the turgid minds of the anti-Prok crowd and, therefore, being literate enough to spell moron without an "a", they prefer to remain silent in their protest; however much the bile froths in their throats.

[Ahab Qvetcher]

Now c'mon Ichabod Antfarm. That is an awfully convoluted way to say it. Repeat after me

Prok

Is

Right

As for the bile, take a shot of pepto bismol, and I am sure that will clear right up. If it persists, get off of SL and go see your doctor.

[Marx Dudek]

I don't obsess over Catherine, no matter how much she deludes herself into thinking I (or anyone else) does. (So sorry to disappoint her.)

I am more concerned with passing my Business Law course than I am with responding to anything she has to say right now. However, I have a blog post germinating and will set about writing it when I don't have anything actually important to do.