Sickened Life

With the real life problems of crime and vice threatening to turn the rapidly expanding virtual community of Second Life into a depraved new world, the lines between fantasy and reality are beginning to blur. Dan Rookwood investigates

It’s 2pm on a Wednesday afternoon and I’m dancing on my own. Badly. To be honest, I don’t know where I am; it’s taking a while for everything to click into place. The psychedelic disco lights are hurting my eyes so I make for one of the chill-out gazebosacross the courtyard where I can see a spare day bed. I’m a little unsteady on my feet and end up careering into a woman on the dark steps down from the dance floor. “Sorry!” I blurt out. I didn’t see her down there. “Do it to me hard!” she screams. She’s not talking to me I quickly realise; she’s talking to the giant of a man behind her who is manfully fulfilling her request. He has an impressive mane of blue hair and, it subsequently transpires, a penis of intimidating proportions.

I don’t know where to look. Not over there by the fountain where a woman in leather catsuit is doing inventive things with a whip, nor over there underneath the palm tree where a potty-mouthed man wearing nothing but a set of wings and a sinister grin appears to be touching himself. “Have you just arrived?” asks Katarina Beauchamp, a voluptuous temptress with an explosion of multi-coloured dreadlocks. “Want to fuck?” I spin round just to check that she is talking to me when a small flash of party dress and pigtail runs across the courtyard and disappears amongst the rampant mass of writhing flesh that is Sexy Beach. “Or are you into children?” she asks…

None of this is real but the revulsion I feel is certainly genuine. I have been in Second Life for under an hour and already I’ve literally stumbled into an orgy and, I think, caught a glimpse of a child prostitute. Back in my real world suburban study, I hate myself and feel sick so I log out without saying goodbye and go for a walk.

Second Life – or SL, as the locals know it – is an online ‘metaverse’ that its San Franciscan whizzkid creator Philip Rosedale, 29 (check), thinks will take over the world. Virtually. “The futurist in me says the real world will become like a museum very soon,” he says with messianic zeal. SL has exploded over the last year from a few hundred thousand residents to seven million and rising, 43% of which are female – a far higher proportion than any other MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). Australians make up 2% of the total population, many of whom spend more time in Second Life than they do in their first. Built and owned entirely by its residents of more than 100 different nationalities, it’s a fully-featured parallel universe in which people can play iGod. They build houses, set up businesses, form clubs and societies, hold parties, buy designer clothing, have sex, change sex, give themselves preposterously-sized genitalia – literally reinvent themselves.

Hailed as the next generation of the Internet, SL is creating its own positive culture for social interaction; artistic expression; political protests; education, research and training; entrepreneurship and business. “Disabled people are not disabled in Second Life,” points out cyberlaw specialist Dr Melissa de Zwart of Monash University. “And people with minority interests can find others of a like mind.”

The majority interest is, of course, for those with a one-track mind. The most popular areas in Second Life are the ones where people get their kit off and their kink on. “The Internet allows people the most efficient, immediate access to information and images in human history,” explains Dr Georgina O’Donnell, a consultant forensic and clinical psychologist. “This information can be accessed in privacy and to some degree anonymously. Therefore it is a popular technology used by people to explore their interests, particularly those interests that they might feel reluctant about pursuing in a more public arena.”

Whether you want to try out a hot Latin lover (or ten), a monstrous sex toy or the experience of being a man, Second Life welcomes you with open arms – and open legs. And that’s before we’ve got ourselves tied up in the whip-crack domain of BDSM (bondage, domination and sado-masochism); ventured underground to try life as a “furry” animal on heat; or submitted to the strict eroticism of female enslavement in the land of Gor. If you can think of it, chances are some inventive festishist has beaten you to it.

It could be argued that sex is a necessary evil-ution process in the development of virtual worlds. “Porn is always a technology driver,” says Dr De Zwart. “The demand for video streaming and faster broadband was created by Internet porn. It encourages technological improvements and uptake.” As well as huge money making opportunities. Second Life is big business. Just as thousands of people now make a living off the online auction site eBay, many are doing the same by trading virtual goods and services on Second Life. Virtual property developer Anshe Chung, the avatar of a Chinese-born language teacher living in Germany, appeared on the front cover of Business Week last year after becoming Second Life’s first ever millionaire.

And, just as in real life, where there is money, there is crime. The tech-savvy can write code to enable their avatars to copy, steal, vandalise and attack what is not theirs. Moreover with the easy exchange of real money into Linden dollars (L$250 is roughly US$1), there is nothing to stop money laundering being used to hide real assets in virtual property. “What did you do with the drug money, boss?” “I bought a chain of shops selling decorative genital piercings in Second Life!”

One of the great attractions of SL for people is that you can be exactly who you want to be. You can choose to relive your childhood if you so desire. Worryingly, however, a growing minority within SL are taking the innocence out of child’s play – by having sex with apparently underdeveloped, underage avatars (SL characters). Not so much Second Life as sickened life.

Given that the Internet has long been a comparatively safe haven for the craven, it stands to reason that paedophiles would be amongst the first early adopters to set up clandestine shop in this young medium. Does the sense of comradeship provided by SL serve to normalise fetishist proclivities? “Yes,” says Dr O’Donnell. “For an individual who is aware that their sexual interests are not mainstream, it can be very encouraging for them to find other people who share the same interests, and in some cases who may be interested in acting out the fantasies in real life.”

Earlier this year, a German investigative reporter called Nick Schader made headlines around the world when he exposed paedophilia in SL. Just as I immediately discovered to my horror, it’s far too easy to find evidence of child pornography within the adult areas of SL, even if you’re not looking for it. “my name is naughty [name censored],” reads one advert, alongside a sickening picture of a naked child avatar standing provocatively. “i am a very young little girl and with help from my dad i am an escort. can do house visits for men and women. pay up front and you get your monies [sic] worth as I have been taught well by daddy. 300l for the first 10 mins. 200l for every 10 mins after.” (Just over and just under US$1 respectively.)

Unlike me, Schader followed the pigtails until they led him to the paedophiles.
“I joined suspicious user groups called things like ‘daddy and his baby girl’ and ‘preensluts’,” Schader tells me in his best English. “I found three meeting places for paedophiles in SL. It was no secret there to talk about raping or having sex with child avatars. I found lots of ‘children’ running around offering sex for Linden dollars and when I posed as a child myself I was asked to have sex all the time. I witnessed every kind of sex: with children, with animals, groups of grown-ups raping little girls. It was horrific. One day, a player who had lots of customers offered me (without being asked) real paedophile photos. He told me that he had 3000 photos for sale in SL. ”

Schader’s investigation team filmed and documented everything and took the evidence to Linden Lab, the company behind SL. But to add a twist to an already twisted plot, it transpired that the people behind the avatars were all adults who were “age playing”, i.e. pretending to be children. Why? “Many people enjoy role play because it is an escape from their own lives,” explains Dr O’Donnell. “People have different motivations for engaging in age play. It may be to recover from childhood trauma or negative experiences, or simply to experience an aspect of childhood. Alternatively, age play can be symptomatic of sexual fetishes involving minors.”

Up until recently, Linden Lab had taken a quite deliberately light-on, laissez-faire regulatory approach, preferring to allow the community to work things out itself. “We want to govern as little as we can,” said Rosedale who envisioned (some would argue naively) a libertarian Utopia. But the negative publicity surrounding Schader’s revelations precipitated a sudden change in tack. Those involved were immediately banned from SL and their details passed on to the German police. Unlike in America (where Linden Lab’s 6,500 humming servers are based), the depiction of virtual child porn is illegal in Germany and the authorities have so far caught one of the men involved. “The police found a lot of child pornography on his computer,” says Schader. “Now they are getting his contacts.”

Linden Lab hurriedly released a statement to all residents outlining its new policy. “We simply will not tolerate the depiction of sexual or lewd acts involving minors in Second Life,” read the blog. “If Linden Lab learns that someone is engaging in, advertising or promoting [such] locations or activities…their account will be terminated and we will fully co-operate with all appropriate authorities.”

Some residents were pleased with the decisive action, including Karen Palen who runs a fetish club within SL. “My neighbours have clearly had an ‘age play’ property which was definitely advertised,” she says on a message board. “I know this because as I was building a house next door to rent, tons of men would drop in looking for sex with little girls and boys. At my fetish club we actively ban child avatars and have always had this policy.”

But most of the residents feel that their rights have been compromised by the ruling – particularly the role-playing groups such as the BDSM community; the Furries (those anthropomorphic animal avatars); and the Gorean masters and slaves. Many residents have joined together to form a pressure group campaigning for freedom of expression. They argue that as no real children were harmed and the age play took place between consenting adults in a private part of SL, there was no need for Linden Lab to get so Big Brother about it.

“Consent is irrelevant where child pornography of any type is concerned,” says Professor Dan Hunter, an expert in cyber law at the University of Melbourne. In his opinion, there is little doubt that the activity was illegal. “Consensual interaction between adults in not a crime but the depiction of child sexual activity in any form – real, animated or virtual – is unquestionably an offence under Australian law. If the state laws say something is illegal, it’s illegal.”

Added to that, some criminal psychologists argue that for those who role-play sex with children in SL, there could be serious real world consequences. An avatar may be an escape from self, but it is also a personification. The influence can work both ways, as Tim Guest wrote in his book, Second Lives. For example, American soldiers are trained on military versions of MMORPGs to desensitise them to killing and prepare them for war. “There is some evidence that MMORPGs do detach people psychologically from the relationship between their action and its consequences,” says Dr O’Donnell. In the same way, repeated exposure to depictions of child pornography could desensitise paedophiles and rehearse illegal behaviour. “For some offenders, using the Internet satisfies their interests for a while, but eventually the desire to act out their fantasies in real life can become overwhelming and result in sexual violence,” says Dr O’Donnell.

This is not an argument that holds much water for Julian Dibbell, cyber sex crime expert and author of Play Money. “That line is trotted out all the time but it doesn’t necessarily follow,” he says. “I’m not making a case for paedophiles but engaging in age play is not going to turn every participant into a deviant, just as horror films and video games don’t turn us into mass murderers.”

However, Linden Labs are concerned that the negative PR will kill off much of their business and they are under pressure to speak with actions as well as words. But although wiping out the identity and assets of those who are caught acting improperly is a deterrent (as it destroys a investment of money and time), there is currently nothing to stop people logging in from a different computer to re-offend if they are intent on doing so.

“There has to be technology to sort this out,” says Professor Edward Castronova, who is popularly considered to be the world authority on MMORPGs. Indeed he is currently developing his own. “There has to be proper age verification for starters.” At present, the registration process is so relaxed there is nothing to stop children crossing the line of depravity. While minors are supposedly barred from adult Second Life, it is very easy for adults to give them their accounts and passwords. Some virtual child prostitutes claim to be real-world minors. But is that part of role play? No-one can be sure who is who and what age anyone is – which might lead some people to commit offences they don’t even realise they are committing.

“Maybe they need more separate areas: just as they have a Teen Second Life, perhaps they should have an X-rated Second Life where there is complete freedom but also an understanding that anyone who enters knows what they are potentially getting themselves into,” suggests Prof Castronova. On the blogs, other people have suggested writing code to make it impossible for child avatars to have sex, or even to enter hardcore adult areas.

The lack of censorship is what attracts many to SL, but Prof Castronova argues that some rules are necessary to stop the community degenerating into Lord of the Flies lawlessness. “If you let people come in and do what they want, sooner or later there will be people who ruin it for everyone; that’s human nature,” he says. “It’s the great libertarian paradox: we’re not free because of the absence of law; we’re free because of its existence.”

The problem is, while the real world legal system necessarily lags behind the rapid development of the virtual universe, the law doesn’t really exist in the wild west web. And even where it does, enforcement is problematic due to issues of jurisdiction and expense. If the server owner is in the US but the offender is in Australia, where should the case be dealt with? Can the owner or publisher of an MMORPG decree that certain laws apply to gamers? And what are the consequences of letting private companies make laws for millions of people? The issue is creating a dust-cloud of legal questions that no-one can currently answer and that the authorities are struggling to handle.

“It’s a challenge for us and we realise that we’re always going to be playing a game of catch-up, but we are confident that we are well equipped to deal with this issue,” says AFP Assistant Commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg, head of OCSET (the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team). “It’s no surprise to us that predators are using Second Life to engage in age play. This is just what they do when they assume the identities, interests and language of children in Internet chat rooms.

“We see the Internet as a community and we police it as such. But this is a problem worldwide so we are working with the Virtual Global Task Force which is an official international alliance of police forces that ensures a 24/7 police presence in a borderless world.

“We have an overt police presence online and a covert one where we can assume identities of children or like-minded adults in order to catch offenders. It’s not too difficult to track them down with the help of Internet Service Providers. We just need to make sure that our laws are ‘technology neutral’ so they aren’t left behind by the development of these virtual worlds.”

Caution in law making is, of course, essential. “There is a danger of legislating too quickly,” explains Nic Suzor, a specialist in technology law at QUT. “We just don't understand enough to be able to make general rules which will be able to be applied to all situations. We need to give the owners of virtual worlds the ability to shape their environments the way they want to do so, and we need to give participants the ability to express themselves and govern their own actions. We should only step in as a last resort, where we can see real harm to real people, and we are sure the general rules we are going to make aren't going to severely limit the utility of the virtual worlds.”

But while we figure out what the rules of the Brave New World should be, it could be argued that the lag gives computer-savvy “perverts” a period of immunity from prosecution. “Yes, there’s no question about that,” says Prof Castronova. “But we’re in a period of useful vaccine now where we’re working out what we can and can’t cope with, what is and isn’t acceptable. Second Life is finally going to make us deal with things as a society that we should have dealt with years ago, perhaps when TV first came in. I feel very positive that it will make us more ethically mature and the law will improve and become more sophisticated as a result.”

Until the law has caught up with the development of virtual worlds, predators are out of reach of its long arm. There is no guarantee that those caught as a result of Schader’s investigation will be found guilty at trial. People may join Second Life to escape reality only to discover that fantasy is even worse. It’s a depraved new world – perhaps even more so than the old one.