RapeLay Video Game Outrage Over Rape, Violence Against Women

by Amy Judd | March 30, 2010 at 12:33 pm

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A Japanese Video Game Called RapeLay Has Stirred Up Controversy and Outage Over the Obvious Theme of Violence Against Women

In the video game RapeLay, players can assault, touch, grope and even rape a teenage girl character, her mother and her sister aboard a train according to CNN. As the player you can even invite your friends to join you and you can gang rape the game characters over and over. Later, as a 'means of revenge' according to the game, you can impregnate a girl and then urge her to get an abortion as you accuse her of molesting you on the train.

This game is not new on the market, it was released a while ago, but despite outrage from women's groups and anti-violence groups, the game has only grown in popularity with dozens of websites offering it for download, some of them for free.

Jim Gardner in Britain who heard about the game because of the controversy said:

"I think the idea that you can do it by wholesale banning is just never going to work anyway because we downloaded it for free off the Internet,"

Now, game makers want this renewed interest in RapeLay to encourage Japan to place restrictions on their video games; they have censorship laws for explicit sexual content such as blurring out genitals but they do not have any restrictions on themes in games.

Taina Bien-Aime from Equality Now told CNN:

"It's obviously very difficult to curtail activity on the Internet. But the governments do have a role in trying to regulate this sort of extreme pornography of children, both in their countries, and through the Internet ," she said, adding that they were calling for the Japanese government "to ban all games that promote and simulate sexual violence, sexual torture, stalking and rape against women and girls. And there are plenty of games like that. "

There are other games on the Japanese market similar to RapeLay, which are known as hentai games. Many of them are centered around the theme of revenge.

A spokesperson for the Japanese government told CNN on the telephone that they are aware the games are a problem but they have not moved towards any national law to deal with the issue.

It is possible to control distribution of material such as this in this digital age?