I attend the American University and am taking a course entitled "Reading and Writing in Virtual Reality." I read an essay by Julian Dibbel about CyberRape. I brought the issue of CyberRape up during class and received a massive amount of negative feedback, many from male students as well as female students. Their motto was "if its not physical, it's not real." Many took the issue as a joke, I was wondering how you felt about the issue and where I could find sites or pages on CyberRape because I could not locate any here. Thank you for your time. Sincerely, Peiwen

Thanks for your note and sorry that you have such insensitive people in your class. Everyone would agree that rape is a violent crime (or most people). Violence is described as verbal, sexual, physical. With this line of thinking, then yes Cyberrape is real. Ask them if they believe in "Cybersex" (or "phonesex" for that matter). I bet the answer is yes! Check out the March/April issue of Ms. Magazine--there is an article re: this same subject.
—Amy