Crowdsourcing Rape: The Community Behind the Crime

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When Europol announced the latest findings from Project Medusa, most of the headlines focused on the details we have been trained to look for in crime reporting: the arrests, the victim counts, the countries involved, the scale of the operation. I’m not saying those details don’t matter; they do. They tell us something about the scope of the investigation and the resources being devoted to it.

But I think they obscure the most important thing investigators actually found.

The most important discovery was not that yet another group of men committed rape. We already knew that rapists exist. We already knew that some men drug and assault their partners, from Dominique Pelicot to the CNN rape academy. We already knew that the internet can be used to facilitate violence.

None of that is new. The genuinely interesting question, for me, is why and how these men were seeking each other out in the first place.

What Europol and other international authorities keep uncovering are not merely offenders occupying the same digital space. They are communities. Networks of men who exchange information, teach one another, solve problems together, encourage one another, and sometimes celebrate one another’s crimes. The more I think about these investigations, the less interested I become in the websites or the individual perpetrators themselves and the more interested I become in the social relationships behind them.

The existence of rapists is horrifying, but it is not surprising. The existence of communities devoted to helping rapists become better at rape should make us stop and think.

To recap, dealing with these rape networks feels a bit like playing whack-a-mole. You shut one down and they keep returning. Motherless, the website that was hosting abuse videos under the guise of ‘sleep porn’, was shut down after the CNN investigation and not two months later returned.

Project Medusa shut down 4 more similar networks in July. But more will keep appearing. The results of the operation for just the month of June:

• 156 perpetrators and victims identified

• 274 new investigative leads

• Four new misogynist online communities identified

Another thing that I need to point out before we proceed is that sleep rape is a sad reality that is way more prevalent than we think. Some estimates say that 51% of UK women, for example, have woken up to their partner or someone else engaging in unwanted sexual interactions with them. Here are just a few of these women’s stories, from my own reader community.

More Than a Forum: A Community of Perpetrators

One of the easiest mistakes to make when discussing online communities is to imagine them as passive spaces. A forum is just a website. A chat group is just a chat group. The platform becomes the story because platforms are visible. They can be named, shut down, investigated and regulated. They give us something concrete to point at.

But platforms are only infrastructure, the places where people gather. They are not the reason why people wanted to gather.

Technology did not create rape or intimate partner violence, but it is rapidly transforming how it is coordinated, normalized, and concealed. “These online ecosystems create reinforcement loops,” said , a psychologist specializing in sexual violence and stalker behavior, in an interview for Forbes. “Perpetrators are no longer acting in isolation, they are being validated, coached, and encouraged.”

According to investigators, the men in these networks were not simply sharing abusive material. They were exchanging knowledge; they discussed drugs and dosages. They advised one another on how to avoid detection. They answered questions and recommended techniques. They reassured newcomers or men who were still hesitating to make their rape fantasies a reality and they shared recordings of unconscious women and congratulated one another on successful assaults.

This because it changes the nature of what we are looking at. This wasn’t just a library or a repository. It wasn’t a collection of like-minded people silently consuming the same content while remaining fundamentally isolated from one another.

It was collaboration. I hesitate to call it such because we tend to ascribe such positive values to the term, but it was a… community.

The language we typically use to discuss sexual violence does not prepare us for that reality. We are accustomed to thinking about rape as an intensely individual act, in mainstream culture and reporting, at least. One perpetrator, one victim, one crime. The legal system is organized around individuals. Criminal responsibility is individual. Punishment is individual.

But it seems that the knowledge and logistics that support criminal behavior is not always individual.

A man maybe drugs his partner alone. He maybe assaults her alone. He records the assault alone. But the knowledge that helped him do those things may not have been acquired alone. The practical advice may not have been acquired by himself. The confidence that allowed him to proceed may not have developed alone; he was hyped up and encouraged by his co-conspirators. The normalization of the behavior certainly did not develop alone.

One sentence from the reporting has stayed with me throughout this series: investigators repeatedly described these men as helping one another. Not merely offending alongside one another. Helping one another.

That is the part that I can’t quite get over.

Crowdsourcing Rape

The phrase is deliberately provocative because I think it captures something essential about what these communities are actually doing.

We normally associate crowdsourcing with innovation, creativity and problem-solving. People contribute knowledge, they share expertise and collaborate toward a common goal. The underlying premise is that a group can often accomplish something more effectively than an individual working in isolation.

The men uncovered by these investigations appear to have understood this principle perfectly. The activity around which they organized was different than what we usually think of when we talk about crowdsourcing, but the social logic was exactly the same.

• They pooled information.

• They shared experience.

• They answered questions.

• They solved practical problems.

• They taught newcomers.

• They accumulated knowledge and passed it on.

• They rewarded participation.

• They transformed individual acts into collective projects.

In other words, they crowdsourced rape.

By saying this, I don’t want to suggest that every participant contributed equally or that criminal responsibility should be collective. Individual men remain responsible for their own actions and some may be more monstrous than others. But focusing exclusively on individuals risks and guilt is obscuring something equally important: the social structures that helped sustain those actions.

The assaults may have occurred in private bedrooms, but the expertise that supported them was often developed in public communities.

I think that sentence gets at the heart of what makes these investigations so disturbing. Most discussions of sexual violence focus on the moment of the assault itself. These investigations force us to look at everything surrounding that moment: the conversations, the advice, the encouragement, the social reinforcement, the transfer of knowledge from one offender to another.

What investigators uncovered was not merely a collection of crimes. It was a mechanism through which knowledge about those crimes was produced, preserved and transmitted.

And human beings have always been remarkably good at building those mechanisms.

More Than Information

One reason I find these communities so fascinating is that practical information was almost certainly not the only thing they were providing.

After all, most of the information being exchanged was not difficult to obtain. A person determined to find information about sedatives, recording devices or methods of avoiding detection could probably locate at least some of it without joining an online community.

So why seek out the community?

Because human beings do not join communities just to acquire facts. We join them to acquire belonging. We seek out people who understand us. We seek validation for our beliefs and desires. We seek reassurance that we are not alone. We seek confirmation that our actions make sense.

I suspect this is where the true significance of these networks lies. It’s the same kind of warped brotherhood that sociopathic men find in the most toxic corners of the manosphere.

When I watched the famous documentary Inside the Manosphere earlier this year, that is the kind of moment that struck me most. The moment when you can still see the shame that some of these men still felt at the views they were trying to boast with. I think a lot of these toxic men would do anything to reassure themselves there’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s part of the same pattern of avoiding accountability, even from their own conscience. A community can provide that and eliminate self-doubt.

The men involved in these rape networks were not only exchanging practical knowledge. They were also creating a social environment in which that knowledge appeared normal. Every discussion communicated that other people were doing the same thing.

Every shared video suggested that the behavior was neither rare nor extraordinary. Every piece of advice reinforced the idea that these acts were problems to be solved and optimized rather than moral boundaries not to be crossed.

Information was part of what these communities provided. Permission was another part. Validation and normalization were another. The practical advice maybe mattered, but I think the social validation and reinforcement mattered even more.

Why Communities Matter

I think this is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable.

The traditional narrative surrounding sexual violence tends to focus on individual pathology. We imagine a deviant man acting on deviant desires; the emphasis falls on his psychology, his moral failures, his personal abnormalities. The story is reassuring because it allows us to locate the problem entirely within the individual.

But communities complicate that picture.

A community does not commit a crime, an individual does. But communities can influence what individuals perceive as normal, possible and acceptable. They can lower barriers and provide encouragement. They can transform private impulses into shared identities.

This is not a controversial observation when discussing almost any other aspect of human behavior. We readily acknowledge that people influence one another and we understand that peer groups shape attitudes. We recognize that social norms affect what people feel comfortable doing.

Still, many people become reluctant to apply the same insight to sexual violence, when it comes to perpetrators. (We already know how victims of violence are benefitting from the existence of supportive communities, I for my part, am striving to provide one here.)

Perhaps because the implications are disturbing.

If one hidden forum exists, it can be dismissed as an aberration. If multiple international communities emerge, disappear and re-emerge over time, the explanation becomes harder to contain. At some point we are no longer looking at a handful of isolated offenders who happened to find one another online. We are looking at an ecosystem capable of repeatedly generating communities.

And ecosystems raise different questions than individuals do. The question is no longer simply why a particular man committed a particular crime. The question becomes why there are enough men, in enough places, seeking enough validation from one another, to sustain these communities over time.

The Community Behind the Crime

Feminists have spent decades arguing that sexual violence is not merely a collection of individual acts, it’s also a social phenomenon and a structural feature of the patriarchal systems we live in. We call this rape culture. Critics often dismiss this claim as ideological, abstract or exaggerated. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the Europol investigations is how concrete they make the argument.

Investigators are not uncovering theories, they are uncovering communities. Real communities populated by real men who are actively teaching, encouraging and validating one another.

I think this is why shutting down one website is never enough. Websites and platforms are replaceable. Even individual communities are often replaceable. When one disappears, another can emerge elsewhere, and the new findings from Project Medusa prove that this is exactly what is happening. What is far more difficult to confront is the demand that repeatedly gives rise to them.

In the first article in this series, I argued that the most important lesson from these investigations is that the rape networks keep coming back. In the second, I explored the stories of women who discovered that the line between these investigations and ordinary intimate relationships is thinner than many people would like to believe.

This third lesson may be the most uncomfortable of all.

We often imagine rape as a solitary crime committed by solitary men. These investigations suggest that at least some forms of sexual violence are planned, sustained and maybe even ideated through social relationships. The men involved are not merely committing crimes, they are helping one another commit crimes. They are sharing expertise, transmitting knowledge and building communities around violence.

Sometimes language ought to make us uncomfortable because comfort obscures what is actually happening. Every tutorial told participants that the behavior was possible. Every piece of advice suggested it could be done more effectively. Every success story implied it was worth doing. Every congratulatory comment communicated that it was acceptable.

What I’m arguing is that every new member learned not only how to commit these acts, but how to think about them.

That is what communities do. They transmit knowledge, certainly. But they also transmit norms. They teach people what is ordinary, what is admirable and what is permissible.

I really hope that the professionals working on Project Medusa have anthropologists among them, as nauseating as the work sounds.

Because yes, of course the practical knowledge shared in these networks matters. But I think the social knowledge matters even more. And until we understand the community behind the crime, we will continue to misunderstand the crime itself.

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