Predators and Roleplaying Communities

[mietze]

I do not know if this will help. But my experience with predatory people is that most of the time they don’t hone in on one/their group of targets right away, but cast a wide net. They actually don’t always go after the easiest targets but the most rewarding personally for them–which for a lot of the worst means breaking down people who say no or express discomfort. I think a lot of people like to believe that the only people who get targeted are those who have signaled something, but I don’t think that’s true, especially in what happens in our community.

Are there some that seek certain markers (like age, people who don’t shut off inappropriate communication the first time, ect)? Yes. But there are so many for whom that’s actually not a barrier and just adds to the excitement of breaking down someone who isn’t the stereotype and especially if they can get that person to fear that other people are going to see them as that stereotype and that they ‘deserved’ this sort of transgression. Those are the sick fucks and they rarely are manipulating and hurting just one person at a time, or the same type of person at a time either.

I think this is why destroying slutshaming and ‘well you shouldn’t have given that contact info’ type of shit is so important. It makes the collective us feel better to be able to feel “well, that wouldn’t be me, because I’m not 16/I don’t do discord/I draw the line with others all the time” but the truth is I think a lot of people are vulnerable to the the right manipulator. You see it all the time even outside of our community.

Editing to add: this is especially damaging because getting off on breaking down people and seeing what they’ll do for you while a lot of the time in our hobby the ones that are caught DO go into sexually transgressive behavior, it doesn’t need to be at all. There have been horrible situations where sexual attraction or gender was totally not a factor at all. Very very damaging situations. I do think sometimes this is the one area where there has not been as much improvement.

[Coin]

@mietze said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

I do not know if this will help. But my experience with predatory people is that most of the time they don’t hone in on one/their group of targets right away, but cast a wide net. They actually don’t always go after the easiest targets but the most rewarding personally for them–which for a lot of the worst means breaking down people who say no or express discomfort. I think a lot of people like to believe that the only people who get targeted are those who have signaled something, but I don’t think that’s true, especially in what happens in our community.

Are there some that seek certain markers (like age, people who don’t shut off inappropriate communication the first time, ect)? Yes. But there are so many for whom that’s actually not a barrier and just adds to the excitement of breaking down someone who isn’t the stereotype and especially if they can get that person to fear that other people are going to see them as that stereotype and that they ‘deserved’ this sort of transgression. Those are the sick fucks and they rarely are manipulating and hurting just one person at a time, or the same type of person at a time either.

I think this is why destroying slutshaming and ‘well you shouldn’t have given that contact info’ type of shit is so important. It makes the collective us feel better to be able to feel “well, that wouldn’t be me, because I’m not 16/I don’t do discord/I draw the line with others all the time” but the truth is I think a lot of people are vulnerable to the the right manipulator. You see it all the time even outside of our community.

I think it’s also important to remember that just because they’re vile human beings doesn’t mean they’re stupid or unskilled, a lot of them are very socially apt and very smart; being a victim of them doesn’t make you stupid or easily manipulated, and believing yourself “too smart” or “too savvy” to ever be victimized by those people is a great way to find yourself a victim when they take advantage of that overconfidence.

[mietze]

@Coin i also think that’s why a lot of people get caught in the predatory behaviors of people who aren’t doing it (to that particular target) with any kind of sexual connotation. And those can be some of the worst predatory people out there.

[Tributary]

@GF First, you’re not making it about you by sharing this. You’re recognizing that you were also a victim of abusers and manipulators, and there is strength in numbers for victims. It’s harder for an abuser to gaslight you if you have other people telling you that, no, the lights aren’t dimmer when you come in the room.

Second, you are not to blame for being a victim. You are not the reason you were abused.

If you look at @Cobalt’s tale, and I do factor into it at the end there, you can see a pattern wherein each abuser made it easier for her to be abused by the next one. That is why people who are victims of abuse tend to stay victims of abuse. Their abusers teach them how to be abused and they don’t realize that there’s any other way. That is why you cannot overcome the idea that your worth in online RP is tied to your sexual availability.

Your abusers taught you to signal your sexual availability, and other abusers know these signals and take advantage of them. It is not your fault that you have been preyed upon, though. You are never at fault for abuse you have suffered. You should work to break the cycle though, so that you do not suffer more in the future because of this vulnerability.

In any case, realizing you can break the cycle is a very important first step in actually breaking it. It took 9 years to extricate @Cobalt from her ex-husband, after all.

(An aside: the ex-husband is the one who made me realize that some men will mansplain to absolutely anyone they find threatening in an effort to puff themselves up.)

[somasatori]

@cobalt I really appreciate you making this post and that you were able to get out of your relationship. I’ve been thinking about this post all day as we share a fairly similar experience. Hiding behind a spoiler for similar CWs.

Spoiler

I was about 13 years old and started playing on RPI MUDs (cyberpunk, not vampires) after doing the combat-heavy MUDs for about a year and getting bored with them. I was living with my single father who was unemployed, we were super poor, I was homeschooled from age 13-14 after moving to Maui, so no social life, and was subsequently groomed for about six-ish months before the abuser in question bought a plane ticket for me. Every adult in my life (including the game admins who knew how old I was) failed to notice the obvious issue of someone in their early 20s roleplaying sexually explicit material with an early adolescent and then having a “meet-up.” I’m pretty certain there were some sociocultural things going on there, and for a long time I blamed myself instead of the adults who either chose not to notice or didn’t think there was any issue. Weirdly I bounced into WoD games thinking there’d be more safety there since at around 15-ish after getting back into in-person school I associated Vampire and Mage with my RL friend group.

Anyway, also don’t want to make this about me, so I’ll skip the remainder of the details. Like @tributary said I was able to notice the cycle at one point and shored up the vulnerability as best I could. I’m glad that the MU* community seems to have made a firm stance against this sort of behavior.

[Jumpscare]

I’m not willing to share anything that happened to me, but I will add my name to the list of people who got targeted by predators in roleplaying communities in my early years.

Today I stand in solidarity to prevent the next generation from experiencing what we went through.

[Cobalt]

@somasatori That is the thing that still makes me a little angry. There were so many older adults in my life who knew I was moving out to Florida to live with a man almost two decades older than me and only one of them cautioned me against it. One of them told me: Becareful, abuser will isolate you from your family and support network, if that happens get out.

(Tributary at that time didn’t know. I met Tributary after I had already moved out, otherwise I’m fairly certain she would have advised against it).

Thank you for sharing, as well as you @GF thank you for sharing. I think there is a lot of predation in these sorts of roleplay and online communities that is just swept under the rug or just not spoken about.

And @Jumpscare 100% support not sharing your personal details, but thanking you for standing with us.

[GF]

@Cobalt said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:

There were so many older adults in my life who knew I was moving out to Florida to live with a man almost two decades older than me and only one of them cautioned me against it.

I didn’t go through that, just… similar. I don’t think I blame anyone for it, but I do wonder how much it contributes to my trust issues.

[Cobalt]

@GF Very much. These days I rarely TS with anyone who I don’t have an established OOC relationship with already. And even then sometimes I shy away from it. Which is not a reflection of anyone I RP with, but is just some stuff I am still working through myself.

[Adora]

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of us. Thank you all for sharing your stories. They’re hard to read, but important.

With that in mind, here’s mine.

Spoiler

For me, I was already abused IRL long before my online drama started. I won’t go into details, but it was bad enough that I still have difficulty with being touched unexpectedly.

When I was 15, I met a game runner. He convinced me he was super cool, a genuinely good guy, and that he would never hurt me. I was incredibly lonely and just wanted friends.

He was 29, but he was so awesome and liked me because of “how mature” I was for my age, totally, and not because I was an ignorant, fresh faced little 15 year old who was already primed for abusers with a bunch of online friends around the same age.

By 16, he was my “boyfriend” and regularly talked about me coming to live with him. He was emotionally and verbally abusive and stole half the summer before my 11th grade year with ranting and screaming at me on the phone if I dared roleplay with anyone else, while he regularly roleplayed with a half dozen other people and had an entire harem.

But, of course, because he was my boyfriend… I wanted my friends to know him. I’m pretty sure that was an idea he fed me, looking back.

He dumped me a few weeks after meeting my 15 year old best friend whom he abused for years… Years later I found out he then “cheated on” them with a 13 or 14 year old he was trying to get to do a webcam show for him. Luckily, this kid was smart enough not to do that.

We maintained a ‘friendship’ this whole time, which I realize now was really him using my youth and proximity to other teens as a way to lure in new potential targets. (Edit: It was also him maintaining a degree of control over me because with him being my ‘friend’ I didn’t want to do anything to hurt him or cause him suffering. He was handling me.)

Years later I reconnected with some old friends online who convinced me to give the game he was running a go, since it was a theme I really liked and he was ‘rarely around’. He was still around often enough to be up to his old shit, though he was no longer targeting high school students and had matured enough to be going after college freshmen.

Eventually his abusive bullying behavior got him removed from the game and the friend group he was in, and I finally felt comfortable actually interacting and socializing with them.

But I forgot how fucking charming this asshole can be and a few years after we all cut contact, he wiggled his way back in. I started being more vocal about what he’d done and the negative impacts it’d had on me and others, and so he set about getting me ostracized from the group by forcing more interaction between us to paint me as a crazy bitch for not tolerating his presence.

One person in the friend group literally told me ‘it was almost 20 years ago, why don’t you just let it go already?’

And maybe if it’d just been me he’d been abusive to, if he’d been the only person I’d been hurt by like that, if he hadn’t tried to convince me to make a goddamn sex tape when I was 17 with the 15 year old I was too traumatized to do more than hold hands with? Maybe I could have let it go.

But he was just one of a long line of abusers that started way too young and didn’t end until I was in my fucking 30s. I blew up the friend group, let everyone even tangentially involved that they were upset because I refused to spend time with a pedophile who groomed me and countless other kids online, and cut contact.

It sucks, but I don’t wanna be around people who can overlook that sort of behavior, especially when he was literally soliciting minors for illegal materials.

[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.