In a shocking revelation, a researcher at nonprofit advocacy group SumOfUs has revealed that she was the victim of sexual assault on Meta’s VR Horizon Worlds. In the scathing report, the researcher describes some terrifying moments on the platform. This includes raping her avatar, suggestive sexual comments, homophobia and much more.

Sexual assault claims on Horizon Worlds come as no surprise to anyone.

This is not the first such incident on the platform. Since it went online in December, there have been several high-profile reports of sexual assault on Horizon Worlds.

The researcher first put on her virtual reality headset Oculus and selected a female avatar. Next, after being invited to a private party, other users asked them to turn off certain settings on their profile. Notably, the platform comes with a four-foot security feature as standard. The security feature is designed to prevent people from getting too close to others without permission.

However, if you are disabled, there is nothing that can prevent others from touching you and doing terrible things in that case. The SumOfUs report includes video from before the incident. They didn’t share the video of the Horizon Worlds sexual assault for obvious reasons, but did describe the event.

The report states that the researcher “was led into a private room at a party where she was raped by a user who kept telling her to turn around so he could do it from behind while user was outside the window.” could see – while another user came in the room was watching and passed around a vodka bottle.”

Significantly, it’s important to note that this happened within an hour of the researcher joining Horizon Worlds.

Horizon Worlds security features aim to eliminate the possibility of sexual assault

According to a spokesman for Meta, personal perimeter protection makes such a scenario impossible.

“In Horizon Worlds, the non-friend personal limit is set to almost 4 feet by default to make it easier to avoid unwanted interactions. We don’t recommend turning security off on people you don’t know,” they said.

However, it takes seconds to disable the feature. Of course, the problem is also the fact that there are people on the Horizon Worlds platform who actively search for sexual assault. Undoubtedly, the root of the problem is much larger than a security feature.

women on the web3

Meta needs to think about making its platform more diverse and welcoming to women. Women deserve to feel safe in all areas, including virtual reality. Also, they must have a system in place to actively stop and remove people who are behaving in such horrible, heinous ways.

Over the last year we have seen a massive increase in the number of women joining Web3 and also creating great NFT projects. This has to go on. Stories like this will naturally discourage users from signing up. However, it is up to the collective power of the Web3 community to transform the space and create a welcoming and equal place.