(Cadence - I LOVE your avatar! )

Rape in real life is a horrendous crime, often far more brutal and bloodthirsty than the media is allowed to report. To talk of 'cyber rape', in my personal opinion, elevates the relatively lesser crime of verbal abuse in such a way as to diminish the abhorence society should rightly reserve for real life rape. This isn't to say that stalkers and cyber bullies shouldn't be dealt with in real life courts although, in all honesty, even this is a slippery slope to get on. Perhaps the best way to explain what I mean is to give a few personal examples of experiences.

In the days before Yahoogroups and sophisticated, specialized message forums such as this, there was Usenet. (I'm not old enough, in online years, to speak of the earlier Bulletin Board Services) The newsgroups, when I first started taking tentative steps online, were something of an online urban jungle. Social groups formed by association through various interests that, by and large, operated without a framework of rigid rules. There was a sense of Darwinism at play -- an intellectual and emotional 'survival of the fittest' ethos. I would have died a quick 'virtual death' from some of the emotional confrontations I experienced had it not been for the fact I had the intellectual capacity to 'fight back'. I'm not talking about engaging in a battle of wits, though this did happen. Rather, I learned very early on how to draw a very clear 'virtual line in the sand' to distinguish online fantasy from reality.

Fast-forward from here to more organized (and moderated) groups. There was Lycos and Excite, then MSN and Yahoo. Each evolutionary step brought with it more 'safety from idiots' but paradoxically, more idiots to be on guard against. My online education through Usenet taught me how to be guarded with regards to my privacy and anything else that may be a target for online predators but even so, I still ultimately fell victim to an online stalker.

It was a relationship that originally was completely consensual and even enjoyable. It's too long a story to tell in its entirely but essentially, there was a man who slowly pushed past BDSM boundaries we'd agreed to and refused, after being politely and then more bluntly told to stop. Actually, it wasn't that he refused to stop: he simply ignored me and persisted. After all attempts at reasoning with him failed, I (metaphorically) cut him adrift in the ether of the Net.

He may well have started his stalking long before it reached this point. It didn't matter, however, because I had set up defenses against such an outcome right from the start and as much as he thought he was stalking the 'real' me, he was chasing a phantom -- the 'online' me. That said, he came close to breaching the divide between online fantasy and real life criminal activity, but I was able to escape unharmed.

Some time after this, I became aware of him 'impersonating' me online. My own stupid fault for having shared a picture or two with him, and the way in which he passed himself off as me was deeply disturbing. I made some attempts to reconcile the problem through appeals to Yahoo (copyright infringement of all things) but this fell on deaf ears. Ultimately what I did was to re-establish communication via email with him -- according to the old maxim, "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer".

I think what I'm trying to say here is the Net still is, and should remain, free from the constraints of real life. The individual I've just spoken of still roams the Net. Like most mentally unbalanced weirdos, he probably hasn't forgotten about me, but he's so caught up in the online fantasy of his own creation, he doesn't have time anymore to stalk me. The point here is, as long as his fantasy doesn't escape from the Net into real life, as disturbing and unsettling as it might be, it remains contained in a fantasy world that I don't believe should be regulated according to 'real world' laws.

I may come back and edit this at a later date

anonymouse