Girl plays rapelay
What we know is that violence against women and girls is all too real. Does "killing" a prostituted woman in Grand Theft Auto just reconfirm to a gamer the "lesser value" of women in prostitution generally? "With almost any genuine art form, the most important works can rarely be taken at face value," he asserts.īut if games such as RapeLay can now be classified as art, maybe the popular media promotion of sexual violence against women is so normalised that we don't even pay attention any more. Kermode recalls media coverage in the 1980s – when horror movies were seen as likely to "deprave and corrupt" – and suggests that we now have a more sophisticated attitude to that genre. "By the way, I played RapeLay (doing the 13-year-old was best)", said one, referring to the pre-pubescent girl whom players "rape" in the game. We received hundreds of emails from around the world, many calling for our own rape and murder. Imagery includes women and girls being molested, stalked and gang-raped. In Japan there is a whole genre of extreme pornography, known as hentai, which takes in cartoons and comic books as well as videogames. They asked us why we were targeting RapeLay when, they said, it was mild compared to similar available games.
Our international campaign called on the Japanese government to ban games that promote sexual violence against women and girls. In RapeLay the player manipulates an onscreen penis to simulate rape of a woman and her young daughters over and over again.
We highlighted the game RapeLay, produced in Japan, as one example of many that promote violence against women. My organisation, Equality Now, has heard a lot from the fans of some of these games.