When I was teaching high school in California five years ago, we took about 90 students on a weekend retreat to address issues of diversity. One night the boys and girls were taken into two separate rooms and asked to list all the negative messages they had ever heard about the opposite sex. After a couple of hours, the students were brought together in the same room with the boys seated facing the girls.
I felt physically sick as I heard the nauseating and completely inappropriate messages the boys had joked about in their separate room. When it came time for the girls to discuss their feelings about the messages, the stories of sexual abuse began pouring out.
When I first proposed writing a blog to address the disturbing trend of rape simulation video games, I had no idea it would bring me back to that weekend, but, in reading the online comments about these video games, I could hear echoes of the jokes, the stories, and the pain from the retreat.
Many people (myself included) had never been exposed to rape simulation games even though one of the first offenders, RapeLay, created by the Japanese game design company Illusion Software, came out in 2006. It seems like most of the buzz, indignant or otherwise, didn’t really start until this past spring when a new game, Stockholm: An Exploration of True Love, “in which you must abuse your kidnapped victim to get her to fall in love with you,” started to sell on Amazon. (This game has since been banned by Amazon.)
Read the whole story: AAUW’s Dialogue
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