Sexual Violence and Personality Rights in Virtual Spaces

Sexual Violence and Personality Rights in Virtual Spaces

Recently, unwanted sexual contact between avatars in virtual spaces has emerged as a serious societal issue. The urgency to regulate such behavior is underscored by the fact that a significant portion of virtual space users are minors, and the emotional harm resulting from avatar-initiated sexual contact is deemed equally severe as tangible harm. However, existing laws lack the basis to penalize these actions. To address the issue of penalizing unwanted sexual contact between avatars, the question of whether sexual violence between avatars can be equated to violence against humans must be addressed. Previous discussions aimed to resolve this through concepts like cyber personality rights or sexual personality rights. However, these discussions tended to separate completely virtual spaces from the real world, attributing independent personality rights to avatars or, conversely, considering them unique to humans in the physical realm. Such attitudes present challenges in categorizing the type of infringement against avatars. This paper argues for recognizing personality rights in virtual spaces based on the spatiality of virtual environments and the fluidity of personality rights. Furthermore, it advocates recognizing the hybrid nature of personality rights within the virtual space through the actor-network theory. The objective is to establish a theoretical foundation that secures the punitive nature of unwanted sexual contact between avatars in virtual spaces and provides a basis for delineating the various types of such behavior.