‘Mass misogynistic cyber attack’: women tell LBC of the abuse they faced after getting rape and incest games banned

Warning: This article contains descriptions of violent abuse against women.

Earlier this year a campaign run by Collective Shout, a lobby group fighting against violence against women and girls, exposed thousands of online video games with themes glorifying rape, incest and misogyny.

But when their campaign successfully got the games taken down, they became targets for thousands of gamers - mostly men - enraged that they couldn't play their violent games anymore.

The online abuse they have faced since then has been "like a tsunami', they told LBC.

“It unleashed the hounds of hell, a tsunami of abuse, a mass global misogynist cyber terror attack against myself and my team,” said Melinda Tankard Reist, co-founder of Collective Shout.

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“And we are now entering week eight, week eight of this unrelenting attack upon us,” she added.

The women described being sent graphic AI-generated images of women in violent scenarios, child sexual abuse material, or threats against their families and children.

Some users have been trying to hack their bank accounts and even asked X’s AI chatbot Grok where they live and where they get their coffee in the morning.

Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, said: “This is horrific and I'm very alarmed by it.”

“It represents the most serious form of online violence against women human rights defenders I have seen in a long time. All this because Collective Shout is doing its job in calling out misogyny and violence against females online,” she wrote on X.

Their campaign began after it emerged that the world's biggest PC gaming platform Steam was marketing an "incest and non-consensual sex' simulator, encouraging players to "become every woman's worst nightmare", and "never take no for an answer."

After the game was taken down, Collective Shout discovered hundreds of similar misogynistic games being hosted online. Some of the removed games were named ‘Slave Doll’, ‘Sex Loving Family’ and ‘Sex Adventures: Incest Family.’

“These rape games, you know, you rape your mother, you rape every female character, torture women, you torture their genitals. These are virtual rape scenarios,” Ms Tankard Reist said.

When their calls for the games to be banned fell on deaf ears, they took their campaign further.

After reaching out to payment processors linked to Steam and another gaming platform, Itch.io, the payment companies suspended their agreements with the gaming platforms.

Itch.io said it had “de-indexed” more than 20,000 NSFW games while “conducting a comprehensive audit of content to ensure we can meet the requirements of our payment processors.”

But this went even further than the requests of Ms Tankard Reist and her group - which only targeted sexually violent games - which they believe has made the backlash worse.

“It's been relentless,” Caitlin Roper, campaigns manager for Collective Shout said. “We've just been getting really extreme rape and death threats, detailed threats about the ways they want to kill us.

“I'm getting messages, tweets with images of weapons like guns and knives, and detailed descriptions of how they intend to use them on me. I'm being sent violent porn depicting women being tortured and strangled, saying, ‘this is what we're going to do to you.’”

Some of the abuse Ms Roper described is too graphic to include in this article. Before our phone call, she had been taking a break from social media and decided to log into X for the first time in two weeks.

She had been ‘hiding’ from the abuse, she said, with one of her colleagues looking after her account. When she finally logged back in, she found that one man had sent her 32 tweets in less than an hour.

“I came back on and I thought, okay, I think I can handle it now. I think it's quieting down a little bit. I'm probably a little bit less fragile now.

“And I was in school today and came out after an hour or so, and one man had sent me 32 tweets, including AI images where he'd taken my image and doctored it.”

“A couple of weeks ago, I received an image of me that was doctored and my face had been blown off. Yeah, that's probably the worst thing I've ever seen in my life,” she continued.

Both Melinda and Caitlin described seeing images of their faces edited onto porn, receiving daily rape and death threats and being called misogynistic slurs.

When they report the abuse to X, they get a response that the messages don’t violate the platform’s community guidelines. Earlier this year, a petition protesting the games being taken down garnered 200,000 signatures, and was retweeted by none other than Elon Musk, the owner of the site.

“So X is hosting, facilitating, enabling and broadcasting this mass global misogynist cyber terror attack,” Ms Tankard Reist said.

“It works to protect the abusers,” she added. “It does not work to protect women like us. And this has a chilling effect on women who are in the public domain, who are activists like we are.”

Ms Roper said: “I guess it's just really ironic that, you know, we try and call it out, this abuse of women and these forms of men's violence against women and we're just being subjected to the worst kinds of it.

“And that's what we do on these platforms, on social media. We use these platforms to create awareness to lobby for change, for political change, for legislation, to challenge this kind of violence against women. And now, it seems that things are so bad that we have to decide whether we just leave the platforms because they're so misogynistic.

“Because they facilitate this violence and abuse against us and do nothing about it.”

An X spokesperson said: “Abuse, harassment, and hateful conduct have no place on X and we take action on content and accounts that violate our rules.

"We prohibit behaviour that targets individuals from marginalised and persecuted groups with abuse, and have a dedicated section of the X app where this material can be reported to our Safety team directly.

"We continue to dedicate more and more resources to combating hatred, prejudice and intolerance, to help safeguard the platform for all our users.”

A Government spokesperson said: “Under the Online Safety Act companies must take action to protect users from illegal material, including extreme sexual violence and intimate image abuse, and Ofcom has set out steps for social media companies to tackle misogyny online.

"Taking on the scourge of violence against women and girls both online and offline is central to supporting victims and preventing harm in our communities and we will not hesitate to strengthen laws to deliver this mission.”

Steam and Itch.io did not respond to LBC’s request for comment.