Predators and Roleplaying Communities

[Wizz]

Being a teenager in the hobby was absolutely a strange time, and occasionally traumatic. Looking back, when I was much younger I was willing to wave away a lot of things I saw happening to friends or experienced myself as misunderstandings that today would probably have my jaw dropping, but I was very lucky that it never lead to in-person encounters. It makes me really sad to think so many of us were so young and trusting in the company of real monsters.

[Tributary]

@Cobalt I was aware you existed, but we were not yet really friends at that point. I’d gone through a horrific breakup right before joined LA MUSH, and I think we solidified our friendship about a year or two later.

I remember the mild horror I felt when I found out your ex was 9 years older than me and I was 9 years older than you. I’m pretty sure he tried flirting with me in a subtle sort of way, but I didn’t even notice. He just wanted attention, and he kept yours by putting you in a box with no real ways out.

You are not the first person who ended up at my house when they left an ex. My mom was surprisingly copacetic about me having a “college friend going through a bad breakup spend the night” while I lived with her post Hurricane Katrina, maybe because she realized that all the girls who needed a place for the night were escaping from bad situations and needed that super safe energy. (My poor spouse sighs when I need to take in a stray in need, but never tells me no.)

[Cobalt]

@Adora I am so sorry this happened to you. Thank you for sharing, honestly, I have to wonder if that was my ex. Except for some details that were not really his IMO.

Spoiler

I struggle with this because I feel guilt about not speaking up sooner, but also fighting the idea that I owe my ex-husband any loyalty anymore.

While he never pressured me for things like pictures of sex tapes…

Sometime early in our relationship, I found on his computer logs of him having sexual roleplay with one of his ex’s that was really nasty stuff. Shit about her raising a daughter for him that he could fuck. I was 19 at that point and didn’t have any support network and didn’t think I had anywhere to go. So I “believed” him when he told me he was just playing a role for her, and that he didn’t really like or want those things. But now that I’m an actual adult and free of him, I can see that no other sane adult would play along with those sorts of fantasies.

[Cobalt]

@Tributary Facebook keeps advertising age gap romances to me and I am generally just sickened by it every time. Like, why would you push this? The current love of age gap romances just turns my stomach.

And, yeah, we didn’t really solidify a friendship until after I had already moved in with him, and I’m not surprised he tried to flirt with you. He loved intelligent women-- but not too intelligent. Just smart enough to hold a conversation with, but not so savvy they could see through his bullshit.

He trapped me with him in so many ways. Things like how I was ‘it’ for him. Not because I was the love of his life, but because he was too old to start another relationship. Things like after ranting at and verbally abusing me for hours how he still loved me and wanted to comfort me even though I was hurting him by demanding a divorce and leaving.

The first time you told me to leave him, he openly cried in front of me and manipulating me into “giving him a year”. That was always his request whenever I wanted to leave. Give him another year. Give him time to “woo me” and “win me”.

[GF]

I’ll probably never tell my story because I don’t like how it feels, but to everyone who’s shared theirs: I see you, and you’re not alone.

[RedJellyBean]

I think I’ve been lucky in my MU* career so far. I started as a teenager, logging on through the college computer lab. I did chat type games at the beginning, which were pretty normal.

It wasn’t until I started RPing on WoD games that I ran into a few people that made me really uncomfortable. But I’ve only ever had two that really bothered me. Both times, I had chars involved with theirs and suddenly stuff started bleeding OOC. And the direction that it was going made me so uncomfortable, that I cut ties with both people.

I realize my experience is pretty tame compared to others and I was lucky to have cut ties as quickly as I did. Since then, I try not to get involved with IC relationships unless I know the people, or I know other people that know that person and can vouch for them. So far, I’ve been extremely lucky. Most of the people my chars have been involved with turned into really good friends OOC and people that I trust a lot, some of them being people that I still talk to.

It’s really hard, though, when you start out as a young teenager and there are older players on all the same games that you are. I had no idea what TS was when I started. To the point that I was all ‘You do what now?’ when I found out. I’d like to think there are people looking out for the younger crowd, but it’s not always the case. A lot of the times, people don’t say anything when it happens, because they’re embarrassed, or think that’s just how it goes online. I wish it wasn’t like that.

[Rinel]

Very few people who did not grow up as girls are fully aware of this problem. These stories are heartbreaking, upsetting, and horrifyingly frequent. Threads like this help inform people largely unaffected by the issue and help inform people in these kinds of situations that they aren’t alone and that help is available.

[Testament]

The level of disgust that I feel towards these people responsible for this reinforces two points two things for me. One, and I have said this before, but violence usually isn’t the answer, but it’s sure as hell an option. Some people need to be beaten with a brick. As in, I truly as a human, hope nothing but suffering for them. Some people, yeah, I really wish violence on.

Secondly, you hear about this stuff in the fringes, but never truly up front and so bold. So I really respect those who are even willing to discuss it on an open forum. It does make me really wonder why I keep partaking in it when these kind of predators exist.

Then again, as someone who is active in the fitness community, I really wonder why I’m apart of that too.

I don’t have a personal story of my own, but my SO does. I won’t speak for her here, but she dealt with her own emotional abuse and controlling ex for 11 years. There are times, when I’m in my own dark holes, that I have to restrain myself from not looking this guy up on FB(because I know he’s there, she’s told me as much)and paying him a visit. But it’s not on me to get a pound of flesh in the name of someone else.

But like @Wizz, I’m sure there were things I saw and didn’t pay much attention to, under the idea that it was ‘just how things were’ at the time when a lot of us were young and taking part in the hobby. Had I had the knowledge and wisdom I do now, I wonder if I have acted differently. Try to tell a friend that who they were getting involved in wasn’t maybe the best idea ever. How many times I may not would have just stayed quiet.

[Tributary]

@Testament said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

But like @Wizz, I’m sure there were things I saw and didn’t pay much attention to, under the idea that it was ‘just how things were’ at the time when a lot of us were young and taking part in the hobby. Had I had the knowledge and wisdom I do now, I wonder if I have acted differently. Try to tell a friend that who they were getting involved in wasn’t maybe the best idea ever. How many times I may not would have just stayed quiet.

Sometimes warning someone who has a crush on a predator helps, sometimes it works, but more often it does not.

After all, part of the grooming is reminding them that they’re mature for their age, that no one understands them like they do, that though the world may be against them, they will fight for their love. Part of the grooming is warning against warnings.

You want to be able to make a difference, and to some degree, you can: by teaching people what the warning signs of predators are, by keeping people from feeling isolated and friendless, by reassuring people that they have value. You can also make it clear that you’ll always be a refuge. That you’ll be there to help them rebuild and that there are no insurmountable obstacles to getting out.

You should not feel guilty about not being able to prevent these things. Predators design their approach to manipulate their prey and keep these sorts of warnings from working.

Besides that, being a member of this community who will not allow this sort of predator to thrive does a great deal to… well, keep these predators from thriving.

They’ll always be a problem. Every community has predators of one sort or another. But by shining light on the darkness, we make it harder for them to hide in the shadows.

[Prospero]

I think having a thread like this is incredibly helpful in showing members of this community that they are not alone, even as this topic is (unfortunately) touched upon fairly often here.

I don’t know the logistics of how to implement it, but I wonder if there would be a way to make volunteers who have been through this (or are trained mental health counselors) more generally available to the MUSH community that does NOT regularly read these boards.

One of the biggest reasons these predators are successful is that they isolate their victim and normalize the behavior, and even if the victim starts to realize they may be a victim, they convince the victim it is their fault. Which makes it harder to speak up, and harder to escape.

I know it would still require some proactive effort on the victim’s part to reach out (I struggle to think of what we can do to help identify victims in the wild short of calling out the predator themselves, like the signs of human trafficking, but there is just no way I can think of), but if there were an available and well known resource, anonymous or otherwise, where victims could reach out (anonymously) just to ask basic questions of others who have been through this - “Is this red flag behavior? Should I be worried? Is this normal?” - I feel like that could help.

Like, just spitballing here, something that maybe Faraday could build into Ares that could be in all of the Ares games and push back through Arescentral and gets fielded by a set of vetted, well established and well known volunteers who could open a channel of communication.

It might be a crazy idea, and there could be a dozen reasons why it wouldn’t work, so I’m just throwing it out there.

[Aria]

@Testament said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

Secondly, you hear about this stuff in the fringes, but never truly up front and so bold. So I really respect those who are even willing to discuss it on an open forum. It does make me really wonder why I keep partaking in it when these kind of predators exist.

So I have another post that I want to make in this thread for the folks who are sharing their stories, but it’s been difficult to write because this has been difficult to read. I need to sit with it for a little while more before I make it.

But in the meantime, I wanted to respond to ^this specifically.

This post may have started with predators in roleplaying communities, but the truth is that it isn’t roleplaying communities that are the problem. They’re just the community that we, as a forum, share. This is a cultural problem and it happens everywhere. It is a plague and it is endemic. And yes, I know what I’m saying and yes, I chose those words on purpose because this problem does, in fact, literally kill people.

My first memory of being exposed to a predator where I realized in the moment that something was wrong but didn’t know how to voice it happened when I was eleven. I was in a school play at my very small, very Christian school. Afterwards, my father told me that my friend Kim’s dad had been sitting near them and at some point during the evening, had told him that he’d “been staring at me in my dress all night because I had legs like a grown woman’s.”

To this day, I don’t know what I’m more shocked by: the fact that this man had the nerve to say something like that to my father without expecting to be punched in the face or the fact that he was right and my father, who’d been abused himself as a child, passed this on to me as a compliment I should be happy about. A “compliment” from forty year old man, whose house I had slept in more than once when having overnights with my friend. A “compliment” that just meant that I was growing up and men were going to fawn over me. I should be so happy!

That he said this about an elementary school child.

I am well and truly glad that the RP community has gotten a somewhat better grasp on this than it had when I was fifteen. I understand the urge to leave it anyway and respect the choice of people who already have. But the next community and the next hobby and the ones after that will have all the same shit, wrapped up in a different package. The only way to stop this is to fight this everywhere, all the time, and force society to change – by educating people as prevention, by creating safe spaces for those who have been abused, by punishing the predators, and by creating an unyielding aura of even a hint of this being totally unacceptable.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

I don’t really care to go into details either. Suffice it to say I’ve been trapped in friend-relationships at least three times who turned out to be narcissist abusers. Apparently, I’m a sucker where these people are concerned – too autistic to tell that they’re lying, I guess.

[Wizz]

@Rinel said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

Very few people who did not grow up as girls are fully aware of this problem.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail as I find it honestly upsetting to remember, but I did want to say that both my own experiences with older players who knew sexually explicit discussion/roleplaying with me was not appropriate given my age – which I openly admitted to anyone I regularly RPed with – were with women, or at least players that presented as women.

I am not trying to dispute ratios or anything like that, but I did feel like I should represent the fact that men typically vastly underreport sexual abuse in RL and it’s likely the case in the hobby as well.

[Aria]

@Wizz said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Rinel said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

Very few people who did not grow up as girls are fully aware of this problem.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail as I find it honestly upsetting to remember, but I did want to say that both my own experiences with older players who knew sexually explicit discussion/roleplaying with me was not appropriate given my age – which I openly admitted to anyone I regularly RPed with – were with women, or at least players that presented as women.

I am not trying to dispute ratios or anything like that, but I did feel like I should represent the fact that men typically vastly underreport sexual abuse in RL and it’s likely the case in the hobby as well.

I shouldn’t need to say this, but…

Yes, I can vouch that this is 100% true. On more than one occassion, teenage me offered to play the role of “weirdly territorial girlfriend” for guys I knew. It wasn’t a good way to handle it, but teenagers. We didn’t exactly have much in the way of appropriate skillsets for addressing the real problem.

[junipersky]

My experience was not Mu*, but was on a government simulation forum. That is about as far as I would like to go.

[DrQuinn]

Let’s not overlook the fact that much of the media that we roleplay about and take in at very young ages makes this process a lot easier for those people that want to exploit others. If he’s* troubled, you just need to love him enough. If he’s treating you badly just stick it out and in the end it will all be worth it. If he’s being possessive and jealous that just means he LOVES you SO MUCH and you mean SO MUCH TO HIM.

We’re pretty careful with what my oldest takes in. She’s still in single digits and expressed shyly to me the other day that she really likes the villain we’re watching in a cartoon series. And I was immediately like IF ANYONE EVER MAKES YOU FEEL LESS THAN OR INSULTS YOU YOU SHOULD NOT LIKE THEM OMG NO! It’s not okay for someone to tease you because they like you! Or pull your hair or punch you or pinch you ANYONE THAT DOES THAT IS NOT WORTH YOUR TIME.

Spoiler

spoiler
My first real boyfriend was incredibly abusive in all ways, shapes, and forms. He was a serial abuser that left a long string of very smart, capable women absolutely crushed in his path. And I stayed for way too long because I didn’t want to see myself as a victim, because tv shows and movies and books had taught me that if I just loved him ENOUGH he’d stop being an asshole and come around to see how great I was and how great this love was and I didn’t want to have wasted so much time on him and see myself as having stupidly fallen for someone that was just so terrible.

All the red flags were there and I thought I was being so smart and careful because I asked him a ton of questions before we started dating. He isolated me from my friends instantly. Wouldn’t meet them. Wouldn’t introduce me to his. Prefaced that with how troubled he was and how I was the only one to ever reach him and he had NO ONE except for me to believe in him and what would he do without that? He love bombed me for the first month then literally turned to me after handing me a gift in the car and said, “So. Now what are you going to do for me?” because nothing was really a gift, everything had a price. Told me flat out once that I was too good for him so he needed to bring me down to his level, like he was doing me a favor.

ButI wasted at least five years of my life on someone that was never, ever going to change. We started like a little support group of ex girlfriends because his MO was to break us down, wait awhile, then come back with sweet apologies when he was bored of whoever he’d move on to next. But since we were all in contact, we knew he’d do it to multiple exes and we were able to move on.

*just using ‘he’ since that fits with my experience. Could be she or them!

[Cobalt]

@Aria said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

My first memory of being exposed to a predator where I realized in the moment that something was wrong but didn’t know how to voice it happened when I was eleven. I was in a school play at my very small, very Christian school. Afterwards, my father told me that my friend Kim’s dad had been sitting near them and at some point during the evening, had told him that he’d “been staring at me in my dress all night because I had legs like a grown woman’s.”

To this day, I don’t know what I’m more shocked by: the fact that this man had the nerve to say something like that to my father without expecting to be punched in the face or the fact that he was right and my father, who’d been abused himself as a child, passed this on to me as a compliment I should be happy about. A “compliment” from forty year old man, whose house I had slept in more than once when having overnights with my friend. A “compliment” that just meant that I was growing up and men were going to fawn over me. I should be so happy!

That he said this about an elementary school child.

I’m so sorry this happened and that your father allowed his abuse to make him someone who did not adequately protect his child.

While I have lingering anger about my father allowing me to be involved with men told old for me as a teenager. At least when I was a child he protected me. The next story is not related to the roleplay community but is related to the general topic of predators.

Spoiler

When I was a child I lived in a small town and my father had several friends who had children around my age and my siblings age. One of them was a single mother who had three children. A girl two years older than me, a girl a year older than me, and a boy born the same year.

I spent a lot of my time at their house. And would sleep in the same bed as the middle girl. There are large parts of my childhood who are blanks.

At one point we lived in some apartments, and a new neighbor moved in with a little girl-- younger than me. My friend freaked out when she saw him and I was confused as to why.

She sat down with me and my father, and both explained that he had used to date her mom and were confused as to why I didn’t remember him. Then, she told me and my father that one night he had crawled into bed with us. That the very next morning she had told her mother, and her mother put a bullet through the floor right next to his head and told him to get lost.

I have absolutely no memory of this incident nor of this man. I don’t know what my father did after he found out about this, but pretty soon after this that man was no longer our neighbor.

[SpaceKhomeini]

Rather than echo a lot of things that have already been said here, the only thing I want to add is that while I’ve never been involved in the Camarilla (or any other LARP organization or that whole scene in general) I’ve been adjacent to it just by virtue of people I’ve known who’ve been involved over the years and the number of horror stories I’ve heard come out of that organization since like the 90s just paint it as a nest of fucking creeps.

I really wonder how high up the rot goes but I suspect the answer is pretty fucking high.

[somasatori]

@Aria said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Wizz said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

@Rinel said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

Very few people who did not grow up as girls are fully aware of this problem.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail as I find it honestly upsetting to remember, but I did want to say that both my own experiences with older players who knew sexually explicit discussion/roleplaying with me was not appropriate given my age – which I openly admitted to anyone I regularly RPed with – were with women, or at least players that presented as women.

I am not trying to dispute ratios or anything like that, but I did feel like I should represent the fact that men typically vastly underreport sexual abuse in RL and it’s likely the case in the hobby as well.

I shouldn’t need to say this, but…

Yes, I can vouch that this is 100% true. On more than one occassion, teenage me offered to play the role of “weirdly territorial girlfriend” for guys I knew. It wasn’t a good way to handle it, but teenagers. We didn’t exactly have much in the way of appropriate skillsets for addressing the real problem.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I imagine that a lot of why my own experience was able to advance so dramatically (flying across state lines, and part of the ocean besides) was due to my being male. My dad did a decent job in protecting my sisters from abuse but there was that gender-enforced blind spot, I think. It makes sense, given that for a long time the prevailing attitude – which is thankfully on the decline – is that men/male-bodied people can’t be sexually assaulted, or it was often played for laughs in media. Gets a litle rough behind the tag.

Spoiler

There are still men who say they wished that an older woman gave them sexual attention when they were teenagers/underage, including men who have recently said this to me in person after a recent sexual misconduct thing with female teachers to male students. I don’t typically disclose, but I use the “I’ve heard someone say to me…” and then list one of my experiences. To that end, I also had pictures taken of me. I was told that the polaroids would be scanned and uploaded if I were to stop talking to this person, and then later, if I told anyone about the relationship. Also that no one would believe me because “men” (I was a boy, but I distinctly remember this term being used) don’t get assaulted by women. I used to make so many excuses for her, and even during this whole thing I found myself writing things like “she was deeply misunderstood by her family and very isolated” or “she was only 21, so barely out of her teens herself,” “she told me that she had really bad self-esteem and couldn’t approach people, but I was different,” and more. We met in person once for a long weekend. She got mad at me on day 2 because I expressed some concerns about sex. She said my hesitation actually was because I wasn’t attracted to her, which is a bonkers thing to tell a child.

Anyway, I think the big thing for me was that she said I was “mature for my age.” I really wanted to be taken seriously by adults back then and I was absolutely very precocious. She also complimented my writing and I desperately wanted to be a writer. It felt really good to be validated and to have someone tell me they loved me, I didn’t get much of that after my mom died. Not intended to be a piled on part of the story, just stating the facts.

A lot of competency was assumed for me by my dad. He still is very proud that I got myself up, dressed, fed myself, and took myself to school and got myself back home starting age 11. My guess is he thought I had things under control/knew what I was doing. He obviously would not think that about my sisters at age 13-14. In fact, he tells a story about the lengths he went to to prevent my oldest sister from going to a concert when she was 14 because he was worried she would get assaulted.

A kind of further note here is that I used my early MU* experiences to experiment with my sexuality since I was afraid of the bullying some of my out friends experienced. Maui is basically a giant small town and everyone finds out everything about everyone else. My dad was far more protective of me with older men when we moved to Oregon, but that was probably due to homophobia and the social expectations of what an abuser looks like. I did tell some of the men I roleplayed with my age.

By the time I was 17 and an androgene goth kid, my age became more of an enticement for the men with whom I interacted. Nothing progressed past explicit roleplay at that point, but not out of lack of trying. Things became deeply unpleasant for me at home and I left around then, someone convinced me to move to Seattle. It was a bad decision. I won’t go into detail, but I think I’ve mentioned my difficulties with substance use in the past.

I wanted to say: I’ve talked about these things in therapy before but for some reason I feel a stronger sense of catharsis from this group discussion/topic. I guess I always felt alone in my experience, even though I knew I wasn’t, so thanks to everyone for being as vulnerable as you’re comfortable with here.

[Rucket]

I’ll add to this thread.

Back in 1996-2000, I was RPing in AOL chat rooms and starting my MU RP journey. I had a number of cyber/TS scenes throughout that time when I was 15-17 with people who were admittedly in their 20s and 30s. There were people who knew I was not 18 and would still engage. They presented as female.

At the time, I thought it all very fun and exciting but I was also a horny ass teenage male, so you know, my brain wasn’t thinking of whether or not such things were appropriate. My brain was very much like sexsexsexsexsex.

I lived in rural Atlanta at the time and I even had invitations to see some of these people at Dragoncon. I never went, and over the years I’ve wondered what might have happened. Now, I just look back on it and am kind of like “What the fuck”

As an adult, I’ve strictly tried to keep any RP with people who are 18 and up. I think 18+ is generally the best policy for a MU or RP game simply because there ARE people who would do creepy stuff. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that I think RPing as underage people is super borderline to me and I will never play someone who isn’t at least 18 or 19.