Crowdsourcing Rape: The Community Behind the Crime

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When Europol announced the latest findings from Project Medusa, most of the headlines focused on the details we have been trained to look for in crime reporting: the arrests, the victim counts, the countries involved, the scale of the operation. I’m not saying those details don’t matter; they do. They tell us something about the scope of the investigation and the resources being devoted to it.

But I think they obscure the most important thing investigators actually found.

The most important discovery was not that yet another group of men committed rape. We already knew that rapists exist. We already knew that some men drug and assault their partners, from Dominique Pelicot to the CNN rape academy. We already knew that the internet can be used to facilitate violence.

None of that is new. The genuinely interesting question, for me, is why and how these men were seeking each other out in the first place.

What Europol and other international authorities keep uncovering are not merely offenders occupying the same digital space. They are communities. Networks of men who exchange information, teach one another, solve problems together, encourage one another, and sometimes celebrate one another’s crimes. The more I think about these investigations, the less interested I become in the websites or the individual perpetrators themselves and the more interested I become in the social relationships behind them.

The existence of rapists is horrifying, but it is not surprising. The existence of communities devoted to helping rapists become better at rape should make us stop and think.

To recap, dealing with these rape networks feels a bit like playing whack-a-mole. You shut one down and they keep returning. Motherless, the website that was hosting abuse videos under the guise of ‘sleep porn’, was shut down after the CNN investigation and not two months later returned.

Project Medusa shut down 4 more similar networks in July. But more will keep appearing. The results of the operation for just the month of June:

• 156 perpetrators and victims identified

• 274 new investigative leads

• Four new misogynist online communities identified

Another thing that I need to point out before we proceed is that sleep rape is a sad reality that is way more prevalent than we think. Some estimates say that 51% of UK women, for example, have woken up to their partner or someone else engaging in unwanted sexual interactions with them. Here are just a few of these women’s stories, from my own reader community.

More Than a Forum: A Community of Perpetrators

One of the easiest mistakes to make when discussing online communities is to imagine them as passive spaces. A forum is just a website. A chat group is just a chat group. The platform becomes the story because platforms are visible. They can be named, shut down, investigated and regulated. They give us something concrete to point at.

But platforms are only infrastructure, the places where people gather. They are not the reason why people wanted to gather.

Technology did not create rape or intimate partner violence, but it is rapidly transforming how it is coordinated, normalized, and concealed. “These online ecosystems create reinforcement loops,” said Dr Jessica Taylor, a psychologist specializing in sexual violence and stalker behavior, in an interview for Forbes. “Perpetrators are no longer acting in isolation, they are being validated, coached, and encouraged.”

According to investigators, the men in these networks were not simply sharing abusive material. They were exchanging knowledge; they discussed drugs and dosages. They advised one another on how to avoid detection. They answered questions and recommended techniques. They reassured newcomers or men who were still hesitating to make their rape fantasies a reality and they shared recordings of unconscious women and congratulated one another on successful assaults.

This because it changes the nature of what we are looking at. This wasn’t just a library or a repository. It wasn’t a collection of like-minded people silently consuming the same content while remaining fundamentally isolated from one another.

It was collaboration. I hesitate to call it such because we tend to ascribe such positive values to the term, but it was a… community.

The language we typically use to discuss sexual violence does not prepare us for that reality. We are accustomed to thinking about rape as an intensely individual act, in mainstream culture and reporting, at least. One perpetrator, one victim, one crime. The legal system is organized around individuals. Criminal responsibility is individual. Punishment is individual.

But it seems that the knowledge and logistics that support criminal behavior is not always individual.

A man maybe drugs his partner alone. He maybe assaults her alone. He records the assault alone. But the knowledge that helped him do those things may not have been acquired alone. The practical advice may not have been acquired by himself. The confidence that allowed him to proceed may not have developed alone; he was hyped up and encouraged by his co-conspirators. The normalization of the behavior certainly did not develop alone.

One sentence from the reporting has stayed with me throughout this series: investigators repeatedly described these men as helping one another. Not merely offending alongside one another. Helping one another.

That is the part that I can’t quite get over.

Crowdsourcing Rape

The phrase is deliberately provocative because I think it captures something essential about what these communities are actually doing.

We normally associate crowdsourcing with innovation, creativity and problem-solving. People contribute knowledge, they share expertise and collaborate toward a common goal. The underlying premise is that a group can often accomplish something more effectively than an individual working in isolation.

The men uncovered by these investigations appear to have understood this principle perfectly. The activity around which they organized was different than what we usually think of when we talk about crowdsourcing, but the social logic was exactly the same.

• They pooled information.