Pedophilia and the Metaverse: What Should We Expect?

There are some major changes coming to technology, with AI, cryptocurrency and the metaverse under serious development and already being rolled out in a variety of contexts. Which means we really need to start talking about how sexual violence can change on these platforms, how this will affect victims, how predators will use the new technology, and the effect it has on users. 

This post is really more exploratory since this type of analysis is not often done, it is more about how we think about these things and lenses and systems thinking we should use when we talk about major changes to technology in general and how it affects teen girls specifically, as they are the most important demographic for consumer adoption and the most targeted for sexual predation online. 

For the record, I do NOT think that technology is the only major factor in enabling child sexual abuse, simply that it IS a major factor and as such needs to be considered by both the companies producing these platforms AND the users of it, as well as school systems, parents, activists, educators etc. 

I want to make it perfectly clear that the stakes of sexual abuse on tech platforms are extremely high and need to be taken as seriously as other forms of sexual abuse.  I wrote about a recent case where literally dozens of suicides of young boys were connected to just one pedophilia ring which, because pedophile attacks are often financial crimes as well (trafficking for instance, or the sexual exploitation of teen models), also involved financial extortion and the sale of child sexual abuse material that was extorted. 

And this is on top of stories we know all too well about teen girls who kill themselves after experiencing “revenge porn” and sexually abusive bullying. So when we are talking about sexual abuse in the Metaverse, this an abuse that is no less significant than one which takes place anywhere else. Yet things like type of the predators, predation techniques, group predation techniques, the grooming cycle, the health impact on victims, the risk profiles, must be evaluated properly in both contexts.  

It’s really important to track how sexual abuse patterns change with new technologies. It is impossible to deny that this has been the case. For example, when chat rooms were developed in the early internet, uncounted numbers of young people were preyed on by pedophiles. (I was one of them). As webcams proliferated new modes of sexual exploitation were developed, such as the practice of coercing, extorting and selling child sexual abuse imagery. Today, we are seeing highly sophisticated, “professional”, global pedophile rings coordinating attacks on children and teens, using cryptocurrency, the “dark web”, anonymous accounts and other technologies to carry out sophisticated attacks. 

One of my biggest concerns about the arrival of the metaverse is what the implications are for sexual abuse online and its effects on particularly youth. How does this new form factor and this new platform change what we are looking at? We’re already seeing image AI used to generate sexually explicit imagery of youth from photos or prompts, and we are still in the early days of what AI will look like when used a tool for predation. We already know about “deep fakes” and we can expect that to only develop with the arrival of these new technologies. 

One of my biggest concerns is that the OPPORTUNITIES for grooming in virtual reality are going to be both different and greater for predators. The Metaverse is talking about a more deeply immersive environment where we will all be spending much more of our time online. School, work and social life in these platforms, will all be expanded and happening more and more within this environment. Off the bat, this looks like definitely increasing the amount of opportunities and vectors that sexual abusers might have to attack teenagers. We have to worry that the rates will go up and that grooming could be more effective and sophisticated than ever in these new environments. One thing we do know is that teen girls and pedophiles are among the early adopters of new technologies. Because pedophiles go where the prey is.  

Another thing that’s been on my mind is that a common technique that pedophiles use is to imitate children and teens and how they talk and think. A large part of their agenda has to do with seeming less threatening so they can groom the target over time. I wonder what ways that AI and the Metaverse could be used to more effectively mimic things like how teenagers talk, or to humanize the pedophile in some deeper way. Pedophiles also use “cat fishing” and I worry about their success rates if new technologies make it easier for predators to pretend to be teens. That recent case I mentioned involved the pedophile ring setting up fake profiles of same-age girls, and then using those to profiles to obtain child sexual abuse material from the young boys, material which was then used to blackmail them further. 

This isn’t just about internet strangers. We know from MANY cases that male teachers have been able to use digital surveillance of students through things like laptops and phones in order to spy on young students while they were changing or to obtain photos and video from them. We must pay attention to how the Metaverse will allow new levels of surveillance by the adults in their lives and by their peers.  

Just along the lines of the major categories here, I would be remiss not to mention how police AND the school systems have continuously used technology, like in-school camera systems and monitored computer equipment, to criminalize children and send especially Black and brown students, into the criminal justice system; children and teens are SYSTEMICALLY and SYSTEMATICALLY sexually abused by adults in those environments, so paying attention to how the Metaverse may play a role into that pipeline into further sexually abusive environments, needs to be a priority. 

I think there’s a big chance that when the virtual world is truly mainstream, we will see the same effects, amplified, on girls that we already reliably see in apps like Instagram and Facebook, both of which are made by Meta of course: increased loneliness, bad self esteem, bullying and peer abuse… and the development of eating disorders, anxiety and depression which have been consistently causally related to use of these platforms. At the very least, this will leave them more vulnerable both to predators online as well as predators in real life. The development of insecurity about their bodies that is cultivated in these platforms, is in my mind a form of sexual trauma in itself. Body dysmorphic disorder and a traumatized body image can absolutely negatively effect them in developing that part of their identity. It’s harder to have healthy physical relationships, intimacy, dating, and to explore those things if you have seriously impacted self esteem from these platforms that knowingly tear teen girls down. Everyone has a right to develop their sexual identity without having actual mental disorders about their bodies very literally inflicted on them by tech mega-corps. And that is definitely an issue here when we are talking about forming sexual health or the ways that sexual trauma plays out in these spaces. 

My concerns have a lot to do with the immersiveness and the immersiveness of experiences and the applications, how a major change in immersiveness opens up new pathways for trauma. I think its reasonable to assume that the more immersive an online experience is, the more potential it has to cause the traumas that we think of as happening “IRL”. While I would argue that the meaningful difference between sexual abuse whether digital or “IRL,” has never been definitive, any delta that exists is rapidly closing when you are talking about these experiences with a much greater level of realness and the greater level of immersiveness and physicality that comes from the new virtual reality form factor. 

It’s important we understand that physical abuse STILL occurs even without physical contact with the abuser, as victims are routinely groomed, coerced or threatened into producing sexual content and carrying on these types of interactions; sexual and physical trauma still occurs.  

One of the things that a VR world suggests and indeed the technology that has been built suggests, is that our future world of technology use involves more haptics (physical sensations), more audio integration, more integration of live streaming, even the addition of scent to the technology experience. Video games are extremely advanced and the cutting edge is and has always been there; we also know some of the very sinister sides of tech-created gaming platforms, particularly in manufacturing addiction. But these set-ups even include full body haptic suits, which makes me worry about an entirely new world of internet-mediated sexual assault and abuse. And of course since all tech causes revolutions in sex as well, we can expect an entire catalog of virtual-reality connected technologies which are designed for consenting adults, but I fear a nightmare scenario wherein those same experiences are used by predators to commit very serious physical attacks. In fact, many of these form factors are already on the shelves. 

Like many young girls of the newly internet age in the late 90s and 2000s, and as continues with girls today, I experienced contact with NUMEROUS pedophiles on the internet, pedophiles that were prowling the early chatrooms and causing a terrible outbreak of eating disorders as that first wave of victims were growing up through middle school, high school, and college ages. If there was technology available in the home that would have allowed them to commit sexual assault on me remotely, they would have absolutely used those tools, as they already committed remote sexual assault by grooming me into photographing and streaming sexual acts. So I absolutely think that is going to happen here especially as we already see pedophiles extorting auto-sexual acts which are obviously horrifically traumatizing even if they are not typically thought of when we talk about sexual abuse. 

The cultural notion that there IS this huge dividing line between online experiences and “real” abuse is extremely dangerous and becoming increasingly dangerous as we navigate into more and more all-consuming platforms spanning a larger surface area of our life and offering much more “immersive”, sensorial experiences that are going to change the MO of pedophiles yet again. The experiences of pedophile victims and particularly teen girls who are attacked by pedophiles is CONSISTENTLY diminished or outright ignored. When girls start experiencing rape in the “Metaverse” and the lines between “physical” sexual abuse and “online” sexual abuse fully disappear, we are looking at a huge amount of crime that is not going to be addressed on any level. 

Some of this preparation is not about the technology per se but comes down to trying to educate children and teens about the dangers they are in, coming to have a shared social understanding that this IS pedophilia, it IS sexual abuse. Hiding behind some illusion that online sexual abuse isn’t real abuse, is actually going to continue to be fatal to children.

In particular, there needs to be an effort made to truly educate teen girls about what this means. When I was growing up, no one warned me at all, much less explained what pedophiles truly are and how they operate. It may be hard to convince children about the lifetime impact, because they are children: they haven’t lived for very long, these are ideas and concepts they haven’t experienced, like “long term” or suffering for the rest of your life from an attack. But we have some truly amazing victim advocates, including those who have worked tirelessly to end the pedophilic abuse of the Catholic Church and Jeffrey Epstein among other cases. We should avail ourselves of their bravery and courage and use that to tell young people the truth about pedophiles, who they are, what they do, what we dealing with, and how to stay safe. 

Previous technologies have always seen pedophiles as first adopters. They adopted the internet and chatrooms to gain access to child sexual abuse material and to locate and target and groom their targets. To try to evade detection and any kind of judicial process, they have been the first to burner phones, to Tor, to crypto. Pedophiles ARE a set of technology “users” or adopters that has a known motivation, a known operating agenda, that have often worked together and who have shown up at the inception of these technologies over and over.  We need to be ready for them at day one of new technology, not when it is 10 years later and people start going 

Hey

What happened to all those girls?

You know, the way we are starting to think about what happened to the girls from the aughts. Trying to re-construct an era where there was truly incredible sexual violence experienced by a generation’s youth, committed by pedophiles who grasped on to new technology immediately to continue their predation. That is not something that I want for anyone else and we are very likely looking at significant pedophile activity the moment virtual reality goes mainstream. 

I suggest we be ready for that.