Height Discrimination in Second Life

What are you talking about...that dresscode thing was AWESOME!!!

But seriously, we're in agreement as to the extent of the land owners' rights.

We gotta stop agreeing like this. People will talk!!

This is all true.

But there are people being AR'd becuase of their height. Thats a completely different issue entirely.

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As an example -
Some 4'10" Av is working as a Stripper, she is slim but isnt a kid Av, she dirobes does pole dances, etc.

Some busybody reports her as a child AV doing lewd sexual behavior ..

Is it somehow the Stripper's fault for not being taller?

Then I would hope LL would have enough sense to file 13 the AR. I know the Lindens aren't known for common sense. I would not call it the stripper's fault. We can talk about the height, but if she has a woman's body and the profile is clean there should be no problem. If a land owner does want to ban all AV's under 5' or 6' or 7' that is his business.

No. That is harrassment. No question.

If the avatar is obviously a short adult (ie, is within a reasonable height range for a short adult, and has a clearly developed body), then certainly they should not be ARed.

If the avatar actually looks like a child, and has been designed with the intent to look childlike and then they have just added text saying "I'm really an adult", then unfortunately yes it is the Stripper's fault because they took deliberate action to appeal sexually as a child and the text excuses don't work. A person in a country with virtual child pornography laws could be prosecuted for viewing that.

If the avatar looks like a child but this was not intentional - for example, they were trying to look like a short adult, but because of lack of experience with Appearance editing wound up looking like a child - then they aren't deserving of a punishment but they should still be asked (and helped) to fix this.

I know I sound harsh, but I would honestly love it if SL could be made to be a place where people could play innocent child avatars without any difficulty. But the issues faced by European users are real, too, and do need to be addressed.

Yumi, if there are countries that can and will prosecute people for accidentally or unintentionally viewing what amounts to child porn, those countries are crazy. That would mean no-one could dare access the Internet for fear of mistyping a URL and hitting a "wrong" site - and going to jail. If that is true, it is they that need to change, not SL. Methinks I would like documentation of your assertion on that, no offense.

The most well known reference for the dangers involved:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/74690/operation-ore-exposed.html

In this case, the people involved hadn't downloaded child porn at all - they'd just visited the adult-porn parts of a site that also offered child porn elsewhere (and that's the category Second Life risks placing itself in). They were subject to a police investigation which took them away from their families. Their partners were asked if they had even suspected that "their partner was a paedophile". Their children were questioned by social services to establish if they'd been abused. By the time the legal process was over, many of them were acquitted, but for 33 of them that didn't matter - they had killed theselves by that time, having no real life to return to.

Now consider that having obtained the material by mistake is a defense against a charge of child pornography. A defense - in other words, you can use it in court to argue against the charge. It doesn't stop you being prosecuted...

Well, I declined to register for this site, so I did not access the entire story, but it appears to detail a "high-profile", gross misuse of police resources in Britain, in a case where US law enforcement pursuing the same international case was much more careful about who it prosecuted and who it did not. A case where the (UK) police evidently round up and accusse of pedophilia everyone who registered on an avowed porn site, regardless of whether they were after the "adult" porn it offered, or the relatively small number of child porn sites it also offered, counts for a cautionary tale of the abuse of police powers. It hardly qualifies for arguing that European countries prosecute accidental viewing of "child porn" scenes one might accidentally stumble on in a place like SL, as if that were considered normal practice.

There is a notorious case of overreaching here in the US, in which 3 hockey players at a very highly respected US university were prosecuted by the local prosecutor for allegedly raping a black stripper. In that case, the prosecutor was in a close reelection race and evidently wanted headlines to help his candidacy: He concealed exonerating evidence, among other serious offenses. That hardly constitutes a legal danger in being a hockey player or viewing black strippers. For those not aware of the case, the prosecutor was exposed, the charges were dropped, the prosecutor was then disbarred and faces criminal charges and civil lawsuits and is ruined for life. It would appear that something like the same fate is well deserved by the British law enforcement officials who engineered the gross abuse of police power described in this article.

If that is the basis for your concern, Yumi, I would suggest not clicking on avowed porn sites whose first web page warns that it offers pornographic materials, at least not while in Britain. If they come after you because there are child avatars in SL and you are not doing the pedo thing, I will bet bottom dollar on you beating the rap. Even in Britain.

We now have a dress code in SL? Besides being required to be 8 feet tall please tell me what else I need to do to meet the requirements?

By the way I wish people would stop arguing with each other in this thread and stick to the subject. IM each other to argue and spare the rest of us the boredom.

I sincerely hope I'm not being seen as trivialising ANY form of discrimination.
Squeeze, I quite agree with most of what you say about the avatar ... but!

We have been told various reasons for seemingly short avatars from people portraying their real characteristics to people who were the very victims of the perceived roles of child-sex.

You expressed your non-commital to any particular avatar characteristic and I know many, mebbe the majority even, share that view. Fine, I'm not criticising that at all.

I've previously expressed my sympathy for commiting oneself to a characteristic so shan't repeat myself here.

The OP was about owners who for whatever reason, are barring short avis. This, I admit, is their right. Your land, your rules.

But why, should discrimination against an avatar characteristic be trivialised against a RL characteristic just because it is adjustable? Why should pressure be brought to bear on people to make their avatar uniform? It's the same discriminatory mindset.

For some here, their avatar is just a vehicle. For some their avatar is their inner selves.

I just wonder if Martin Luther King had had a slider to change himself to white, caucasian .. do you think he would have used it?

...which is the original inten of this discussion, Yumi.

Mari

exactly.



...because it's adjustable and something you can decide to have/do. Just like people decide to be rappers and punk rockers. They still have to wear suits to interviews if they want to get good jobs. They still get barred from establishments if they're unwilling to adhere to dresscodes.



Or a mindset of a) wanting to maintain a certain atmosphere in your establishment or b) covering your ass because you're overly sensitive about the chance of ageplay happening in your establishment.

It's not like it's an unfounded concern. Blame the sexual ageplayers for being indescrete with their pastime and letting it all spiral out of control. It's not like this is a brand new occurrance in SL. I heard about it about a year or more before this whole moral explosion.

Don't blame the club owner because he/she just doesn't want to have to deal with it.



There are certain places certain vehicles can't go. The person still can...they just have to use the appropriate vehicle. It's the same thing with this particular situation.



come on now...

Squeeze, while this issue is certainly a tempest in a teapot when compared to RL race hatred and its consequences, I think this discussion is not really trivializing the issue of discrimination. Instead it is putting it in a different and less politically charged context where it can be looked at afresh, and the result, IMO, is clarifying.

I think it has helped us become more clear about the appropriate dividing line to seek that separates discrimination that should be proscribed from discrimination that may warrant disapproval but does not warrant proscription. The line is crossed when discriminatory behavior does demonstrable and unwarranted harm to the person being discriminated against.

Eject X from your club because you don't like X and he suffers little or no real (in SL terms) injury. Orbit X, or threaten X, in a "public" venue because you don't like him, and you are griefing him, because then he cannot be in SL without being at constant risk of being persecuted by you.

Same principle applies to real life. You can have any private opinion of [insert category here] you like, depending on just how stupid you want to be, and throw them out of your home. But you can't run them out of town. Your right to like or dislike someone ends at the tip of his nose.

The RL (and even SL) legal and social complications in deciding just where that line is in a particular case can be very confusing and difficult to determine, obviously, but the principle is clear, and I think this thread may have helped clarify that for some people.

Anyway, I hope so.

I hope this discussion made people re-think their views of other people, too. I also agree with what you had to say about actively harassing vs. barring from a club in SL.

However, I also think that we as a society tend to pull the "discrimination" card rather...well...uh...indiscriminantly.

You can get a scholarship for being just about any social, personal, gender or racial combination (except for middle-class white male) and you can blame just about any social, personal, physical, or mental disorder on a particular gene, your parents, a traumatic experience, or a combination of these factors. It's gotten out of control and is essentially crying wolf. It marginalizes and drowns out the legitimate discrimination going on all around us which we seem to be comfortable with because it's been around longer.

Just double-check your situation and your attitude toward it before you yell "I'm being discriminated against!!" Discrimination and all accusations of it should be taken seriously because it's basically a lightweight social variation of rape.

I hope so as well, Har.....

Sometimes hiding things by simply saying "This isnt RL it's SL" it seems to be just covering ones ears and saying "I CANT HEAR YOU".
In RL I have never had an occasion to be in a minority or felt any discrimination. I have felt it in SL and, in some small way, it has opened my eyes. Even though this came about by being in SL I do understand it better and I hope I have become a better person in both SL and RL.

I think the entire issue is hillarious. Be whatever the F**k height you want. DOYYYYY

And no one asked you, Artillo.

For all those ranting solely about child avs, a reminder:

The issue is a short adult, with adult proportions. Not a 'child av'.

But being feared by a business owner as being called out as one. And thinking that they'll lose how many US Dollars worth of investment into Second Life. Afraid that LL will ban anything with a short adult av because someone will scream "child" and that the business is keeping them on staff in their BDSM club.

If height weren't still an issue in RL, there wouldn't be ever-repeated shows about primordial dwarfism and such, on the education channels (mostly The Learning Channel), and there wouldn't need to be shows like Little People, Big World in order to raise public awareness.

But that's going into an extreme beyond the character height in the issue. Regardless, it's still the same issue. Height. "You must be this tall to enter regardless of how old you look" IS a form of discrimination.

It's discrimination when you do it in full knowledge of what you're doing. I've seen the difference between discrimination and ignorance first hand. I was an operator for one of the 711 (Relay Service for the Deaf) services. The people thinking that it was a telemarketer were simply ignorant. The ones who were blatantly told it was a deaf person who couldn't talk for themselves, that was discriminatory. I only ran into one such case, lucky for me.

I don't think this is funny at all. My brother's third girlfriend was 4'11. She had to buy clothes in children's shops, although nobody, to look at her, would doubt she was a woman.

What I find more hilarious is the men. My AV is 5'11" - my real height. Yet I look like a dwarf beside most SL men, because most of them are over 7'6". They *are* Andre the Giant.

I think discriminating based on height is just plain wrong, unless there are demonstrable safety considerations involved, like those rides that say "You must be this tall". It's not about height. An adult will behave like an adult, regardless of their size, and a child will behave like a child, regardless of their size. Anybody who can't tell the difference just isn't paying attention.

Hasn't anybody here heard of "Little People"? Adults, sometimes well into their golden years, that can scarcely make 4 feet tall? Are they children, based solely on their height? No. They're adults, just as any of us here. They can drive, marry, vote, have children, pay taxes, and all the rest. We don't make an issue of their size in RL. Why would we choose to do so in SL?

I understand the concept of "age play" as it applies to SL, but shouldn't it be similar to child pornography law? Someone who is underage, or who *pretends* to be underage? Not just someone who *looks* underage? After all, what is there to prevent a 12 year old from forging their birthdate, constructing an adult avatar, and visiting a mature area?

Credit card, you say? Well, that certainly limits it to anybody 16 years old or over, doesn't it? Or any child with an aunt or uncle that is generous, but just doesn't pay close attention to computer related stuff.

Give your head a shake, people. We are in a world where there are 8-year old children with grandparents who know nothing about the internet, but who are perfectly fine with giving USD$ 74 to their grand-children for something called "Second Life" that their grandchild demands is "really cool", and something they "have to have".

But they don't need that, do they? They can sign up as a simple resident, for no cost, and claim to be as old as they want. Can't they?

So we might have hundreds of thousands of children posing as adults, and that's not a problem, right? Due diligence, R&R, T&C, TOS, and all that, and we're good. Linden did all they could do. But a short avatar is an issue? Excuse me? What part of this discussion did I miss? What was the felling blow? The "Short People" song?

Hint: It is a song, it is a tasteless song, and it sucks. In SL, *I'm* a short person despite the fact that I'm my normal height, and in RL, I'm normal height. Give it a rest, for god's sake.

This is the problem: in some countries it *is* child pornography law.

When an avatar takes action in SL, the sim server sends details of that action to every user in the same sim. Using the data it recieves, their client creates the image you see on the screen of what is happening in the sim. In other words it sends data sufficient for an image to be constructed and that is where the problem comes, because (AFAIK, and I'm not a lawyer) the laws don't explicitly make any distinction between that "image data" and the JPG data that a porn website might send to someone when they clicked on a buy button. This doesn't mean these would be considered the same in actual practice.. but in order for it to be judged in "actual practice" it has to be in court, which means there has to be someone in the court dock on a charge of child pornography - and obviously nobody wants it to be them.

Certainly a German court has had someone jailed for engaging in ageplay on SL, and an American one has sent someone to jail for possessing hentai manga showing underage sex.



If a child poses as an adult, then the legal risk is to them themselves, and *possibly* to the landowner. That last "possibly" isn't clear, since the argument is that the child has already broken the TOS (which says that you have to be 1 and having done that, anything they see is their own fault. But there are some people who are worried that an underage user on their build could wind up suing them if they see pornography there - they seem to have gone quiet after LL offered the age verification solution they did which was a very large and nasty sledgehammer.

But if someone plays a child, and does anything sexual.... then all anyone has to do to be in a position where there's evidence linking them to a major crime, is to *SEE* that avatar.

That raises an interesting point.

You get the pieces from the SL server, and the client on your machine builds an image specifically from your camera perspective. No one else sees exactly the same thing unless their camera is in exactly the same place.

You move along, go elsewhere, and get a new G-rated image. Where exactly is the evidence that you looked at an image that might be illegal to have in somoe jurisdictions? The offending image is gone (unless you shut down there, so it becomes the 'last location' snapshot the next time you restart). LL might have logs that you received the appropriate bits to create an illegal image, but maybe not, if relevant data was sent via UDP. It's unclear whether they have any evidence to show the image as actually generated and presented.

Well, the problem is that when there's a charge of child pornography involved, nobody even wants the process to get started, or even to take that risk! Because if you are charged with child pornography, then even if you are later found innocent due to lack of evidence, your reputation is still in tatters, possibly for life. If you have attracted any media attention, the perception will be that you're an evil paedophile who escaped. And yes, this can apply to both sexes..

Maybe SL child avatar images aren't real enough to be considered child pornography. Maybe the SL cache isn't considered storage of images. Maybe there wouldn't be enough evidence.

But.. do you want to bet your life on that?

And can it be right to cause others to bet theirs?

No offense, Yumi and friends, but this is overwrought beyond reason. I suggest an alternate website for you to frequent where you may not feel any happier, but will definitely feel much safer than here in SL: http://www.pbs.org/barney.

The issue has been corrected.

Evidently there were other issues unknown about at the time, and the place in question has apologized.

None of what happened was my fault, or the fault of my av. *shrug*

But the fact that it happened at all says something about the issues.

As a warning to business owners:

Keep a careful watch on your employees, and their attitudes about things!

The problem that caused the issue I posted about evidently involved the basic attitudes and comments of another dancer at the club. A general attitude that wound up getting the owner an IM asking if they supported ageplay.

They apologized to me, because it was backlash and they realized it shouldn't have been leveled against a small adult av.

But the idea that someone was giving such an attitude is a problem. Said individual was spoken to, and is reportely now looking for a new establishment.

So keep alert. It isn't small adult avs, or not JUST small adult avs. An employee showing an attitude that would draw such a question is definitely bad!

Good to hear this particular instance has been remedied. Alas, an employee who has the ear of the owner can, through secret agendas of their own, can be more destructive than the owners themselves.
I know of one club which has closed and another on the decline, down to the attitude of one manager.