A now-closed Internet forum known as Rape Club, where members discussed rape and pictures of rapes, is under police investigation over possibilities that actual sexual assaults involving members might have taken place.
"We are trying to establish if there has been a sexual assault that has taken place," Detective Acting Chief Inspector Vivien Crawford told reporters about the probe. "It is difficult in this area of adult pornography where fantasies about rape do occur. And they are not necessarily a crime ... clearly just because people fantasize about a particular thing doesn't make it an act that we would be investigating."
New South Wales Rape Crisis Center manager Karen Willis was less forgiving, calling for rape fantasy Net discussions and other like sites to be outlawed for vilifying women.
"Someone who makes a career out of sexually assaulting women will often have started out fantasizing and masturbating about it," she told reporters. "Then, as time goes on, their fantasies get more violent and they will get to the stage where they need to act out their fantas[ies]."
Willis also said she thought the chances were slim that all the Rape Club posters were merely fantasizing.
Rape Club was hosted on the NineMSN portal, which closed the forum once it learned that 46 users had been discussing rapes that actually occurred as well as those that were mere fantasy subjects.
NineMSN chief executive Martin Hoffman released a statement saying the portal counted on users to obey its code of conduct and report offensive content and code of conduct breaches. But he also said monitoring all content all the time on a large portal gets more difficult as content volume broadens.
"The sheer volume of ever-changing content on the internet makes it impossible for industry to monitor all content all the time," Hoffman's statement said, while a NineMSN spokeswoman, Kate Beddoe, said the portal closed four other rape-related forums, "No Rape, No Glory," "Whitepower/rape rock," "Ministry's Land of Rape and Honey, "and "Rape me."
