Researcher Poses As Teen Girl In Metaverse, Gets Harassed By Perverts & Groomers
A BBC News researcher created a fake account to pose as a 13-year-old girl in the metaverse and ran into some harrowing results.
In the VRChat app, users are able to enter different worlds, or rooms, with their avatars while wearing a virtual-reality headset. Here, they’re able to interact with other users digitally as if they were in the same physical space. Some of these rooms are things like virtual restaurants and parks; others are places like strip clubs.
The researcher, Jess Sherwood, created a fake profile with the minimum age requirement of 13, and her real identity wasn’t verified. In the VRChat realm, children are able to mix and interact with anyone and everyone, and there is no limit on the spaces they can visit, either.
The BBC reports that Sherwood had various encounters with users who invited her for “erotic role-play,” and showed her sex toys and condoms. “Numerous” adult men approached her, as well.
There are also rooms in which avatars, both adult and minor, were “simulating” group sex. And of course, grooming was rampant. All this comes alongside racial and sexual insults, and rape threats.
“It’s very uncomfortable, and your options are to stay and watch, move on to another room where you might see something similar, or join in—which, on many occasions, I was instructed to do,” the researcher recalls, quoted by Engadget.
VRChat tells the BBC that “predatory and toxic behavior has no place on the platform,” and also explains to Engadget that if the offending accounts had been reported, “much of the content that you described would be removed immediately.”
“​​VRChat definitely felt more like an adult’s playground than a child’s,” Sherwood concludes. “A lot of the rooms were overtly sexualized in pink neon, similar to what you might see in the red light district in Amsterdam or in the more seedy parts of London’s Soho at night.”
Many metaverse apps have run into similar safety issues. Even Meta’s own Horizon Worlds has had similar incidents, which prompted the app to add the ability to set firmer personal boundaries in the virtual space.
