Imagine waking up in your own home, unaware that someone has broken your trust completely beyond repair. Having no idea that you were raped. No idea that you were filmed. No idea that thousands of strangers had already watched you online by the time you made his morning tea. And that your privacy isn’t yours anymore.
If that statement isn’t creepy enough, maybe it’s time we question the times we’re living in. Because this wasn’t just an imaginary scenario, a recent investigation by CNN revealed that there’s an actual “Rape Academy” running online, and 62 million men visited it in February alone.
62 MILLION.
What The Investigation Revealed
In an investigation conducted by CNN, a website known as Motherless.com was exposed, where over 20,000 videos under the category of “sleep content” were uploaded. These weren’t just any random videos, but ones that included traces of abuse and explicit content, with the user base belonging predominantly to the United States.
The website propagated itself as a “moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever,” with multiple “sleep” visuals posted under tags like #eyecheck and #passedout, where men recorded themselves lifting their partner’s eyelids to make sure they were properly sedated. Some of these videos alone surpassed 50,000 views.
What makes this even more disturbing is that it didn’t just stop at this. The investigation revealed that the members of this online abuse ecosystem not only consumed such videos, but also advised and demanded the kind of content they wanted. And the men, unapologetically, complied.
According to CNN, the comment sections under such videos read less like reactions to the content and more like a manual to intensify the abuse. Conversations related to the type of drug to use, how to use it, and its aftereffects were mentioned in clear language as if it were the most normal and acceptable thing to do.
Some men participated not only by watching the content but also by supplying the drugs. The investigation revealed that one of the users of the website was “selling and dispatching sleeping liquids to any address in the world.” With the supply came a terrifying reassurance: “Your wife won’t feel anything and won’t remember anything.”
Read More: Rural Indian Women Are Made To Watch Hours Of Sexual Content To Train AI
The Horror That Took Place
The videos uploaded were pure horror, including disturbing visuals and livestreams. Users earned by recording the abuse of women in real time, some of whom they claimed were their “wives”. The content included livestreams of men raping women who were sedated, receiving $20 per viewer, with cryptocurrency as the preferred payment mode.
The website ran on the anonymity of the users. And this is what led to the escalation of the crime. With absolutely no consequences for their actions, the users had crossed any threshold of humanity.
From The Victims
CNN reached out to victims of such sexual abuse, and their accounts were horrifying. Zoe Watts, a survivor of abuse by her own husband of 16 years, revealed, “We worry about who’s coming behind us, walking down the street, or who’s even friending us on Facebook. You know, we worry about going to our car late at night in a car park, but we don’t worry about who you lie next to. I didn’t realize I had to.”
Another survivor, Valentina, who found videos of her husband abusing her after drugging her, revealed, “I can’t conceive of the fact that a woman could be treated like slaughterhouse meat. Because in the end, that’s what I was.” She further revealed, “No matter how much you try to brush it off, it’s always right there beside you, the experience you’ve had. It just takes a bed, a camera, a different scent” for her to be triggered.
Sandrine Josso, a French lawmaker and survivor of the crime herself, said, “I would even call them an online rape academy, where every subject is taught. There are all the ‘subjects’ and ‘disciplines’ needed to become a good rapist or sexual predator”.
Could It Really Be Worse?
As per the World Health Organization, about 30 per cent of women globally have been subjected to sexual violence. Most of these have been intimate partner violence, meaning sexual abuse by their husbands, close friends, or boyfriends. Almost 27 per cent of women between the ages of 15 and 49 years have reported experiencing physical or sexual violence by their partners.
The investigation by CNN might just be one of the many crimes being planned against women in an environment that encourages these acts. Because systems like these do not grow on their own, they exist where there is space for them.
62 million views isn’t just data; it is proof that something as horrifying as this website could exist at this scale for so long without any consequences for those who ran it. Because something like this should not exist, no matter how big or small the system is. But the fact that it does, maybe that’s the real problem.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: CNN, World Health Organization, Outlook
Find the blogger: @shubhangichoudhary_29
This post is tagged under: rape academy, cnn investigation, online sexual abuse, digital crime, women safety, intimate partner violence, sexual violence statistics, world health organisation data, abuse in relationships, cyber exploitation, online predators, abuse awareness, internet safety, gender violence, privacy violation, criminal networks online, social media dangers, anonymous crime, sexual assault awareness, global crime investigation, violence against women, relationship abuse, hidden crimes, digital ethics
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