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It feels a bit like playing whack-a-mole.
Authorities shut down one major online rape network, only to discover several more. Every successful investigation removes one community from the board, while revealing that others are already waiting beneath the surface.
Earlier this year it was announced that an international investigation started undercover by the CNN dismantled one of the largest known online communities dedicated to helping men drug, rape and film unconscious women. You may have followed the story back in April; the site that hosted these videos as ‘sleep porn’ was Motherless and the news stories dubbed it ‘the rape academy’.
Investigators described a sprawling network where members exchanged advice on sedating partners, shared videos of assaults, and congratulated one another for abusing women who often had no idea what had happened to them. It was horrifying. It was also tempting to think of it as exceptional: a hidden corner of the internet, a particularly depraved group of men, a major victory for law enforcement.
Then, just a few months later, yesterday, investigators announced they had found more. You can read the news story here.
“An international police operation spanning seven countries has uncovered highly organized networks of offenders who drug and rape their partners and use online chat groups to aid and encourage their “horrifying” assaults, authorities said on Thursday.”
The Europol is now calling it Project Medusa and they say that it will be an ongoing investigation for a long, long time, as a joint effort by police forces in countries spanning the globe.
They uncovered 4 more international misogynist online communities dedicated to sleep rape, more victims, and more perpetrators. More evidence that when one of these communities disappears, another is waiting to take its place, and that there are probably still many more than are still flying under the radar.
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That, more than anything else, is the story. For me, this recent news is not about that older criminal network, or the new one uncovered. We always knew rapists existed and that the internet can be a tool that helps them. Sadly, we’ve long known that people who commit sexual violence can find each other online, but that investigators keep uncovering new ones.
Like an endless game of whack-a-mole, each successful operation seems to reveal that the problem was never a single network at all, more and more rape networks pop up in what is proving to be an entire landscape.
There is a temptation, whenever a story like this breaks, to reassure ourselves that we’re looking at monsters, not ordinary men, not our neighbors or colleagues. Certainly not someone’s husband or boyfriend. Just monsters. That was also why I took issue with the emerging narrative of the so-called ‘Epstein class’. It’s not the Epstein class, it’s everyday Joe too.
The word ‘monster’ is comforting because monsters are rare. They are exceptions. This allow us to comfortingly believe that if we identify them quickly enough, lock them away, and dismantle their forums, the danger goes with them. But these investigations are becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with that story, because monsters don’t usually organize international communities. They don’t write tutorials, help each other procure illegal substances, troubleshoot one another’s mistakes, or patiently teach newcomers. Communities do. And we like the word ‘community’, normally.
Also, communities don’t emerge because one uniquely evil person had an idea. They emerge because enough people are looking for one another that, once they connect, they stay. That’s what makes this latest investigation so unsettling: not simply what these men did, but how many of them there appear to be.
This is why I’m frustrated when news stories and the Europol are talking about the uniqueness of these men or their deviancy when instead they should be talking about patriarchy. If we acknowledge that this is the system we live in, then these men are not deviant at all. They are simply taking the teachings of our culture further than others.
I guess I should be happy that at least the Europol is naming these rape networks ‘misogynistic online communities’, partially acknowledging the social scourge that misogyny is. It’s a long way from calling it patriarchy, but it’s a step in the right direction.
I mean, hell, men are joking about spiking women’s drinks ‘so that she can’t say no later’ opely, on Tik-Tok, in public videos, and there’s almost no backlash to it.