Identity Overlapping

While virtual harassment, assault, and even rape lack the physicality of similar real-world events, many individuals recount their feelings of helplessness and disgust after online trauma has occurred. Especially in a site like Second Life, where users can spend countless hours on the creation of elaborate avatars, users can begin to feel a strong personal connection with their avatar—their virtual persona and real-life identity can overlap. Many users even attempt to fashion their avatars to look similar to their real-life forms, much like the user pictured below.

A Second Life user and his avatar. Image courtesy of rikomatic on Flickr.

Such overlapping means that even virtual harassment can affect the recipient of such abuse as he or she sits at the computer. Virtual rape then “becomes an assault not against a persona, but against the person behind the persona. It is a virtual violation that passes back through the interface and attacks the person where it is real” (MacKinnon, 1997, n.p.). Dibbel’s account of a “rape in cyberspace” in LambdaMOO described how “legba,” one of the victims, had confided to him that, after the attack, tears streamed down her face—real-life evidence of the emotional impact of virtual assault (cited in MacKinnon, 1997, n.p.). Though the likelihood of a traumatic attack in an online space is rare, it seems ethical to insist that instructors consider the potential consequences of such an event if it does occur, and to take reasonable precautions to ensure that it does not.

Particularly in the wake of tragedies such as the shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, educators should be cognizant of the potential for violence and stress to appear not only as an effect of real-life catastrophe, but virtual as well. For example, in May 2007, only a month after the Virginia Tech massacre, an avatar began shooting at others on Ohio University’s Second Life island without provocation (Bugeja, 2008b, p. 18). But such incidents may also be viewed as opportunities for change. After the cyberrape in LambdaMOO, the citizens of the MOO did not silently stand by, but instead attempted en masse to enact a democratic method of punishing troublemakers in their midst (Mnookin, 1996, n.p.). Through a traumatic incident, the citizens of LambdaMOO banded together to reshape their community; many Second Life residents have reacted similarly to violence in their midst. Thus, these traumatic incidents may help strengthen virtual communities and make clearer the legal boundaries that shape them.