Editor’s note • This article discusses rape and sexual assault, as well as domestic violence. To report a sexual assault, or to speak to someone about sexual assault, help is available 24 hours a day at the National Sexual Assault Hotline, 1-800-656-4673, or visit the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition’s website at udvc.org.

Virtual reality games can allow people to play in a simulation of real life — and, like in real life, bad and even harmful things can happen.

A recent case in the United Kingdom, in which a girl under 16 reported being sexually assaulted in a VR game and suffering “psychological trauma,” has prompted a discourse about virtual sexual assault.

“Games feel real to the people who play them,” said Ashley Guajardo, associate professor in the University of Utah’s games department.

It’s possible, Guajardo wrote in her 2015 book “Sexuality in Role-Playing Games,” for game players to separate their playing selves from their everyday lives and morals.

“Players are distanced, but not removed completely, from their own primary frameworks that dictate the normative sexual ethics that affect their everyday lives and sense of self,” Guajardo wrote.

The questions that gaming experts and law enforcement are grappling to answer: Is sexual assault in VR real? Should people who commit such assaults face repercussions in the real world? Is this the start of a new wave of sexual violence? And how should authorities handle these types of cyber crimes?

How ‘real’ is ‘virtual’ rape?

Virtual realities and simulation games go back half a century. One of the first virtual spaces, “Maze War,” was created in 1973. Popular games and platforms like “Second Life,” “Virtuality” and “Meta Quest” followed this release to grow the virtual world.

Earlier versions of video games, Guajardo said, engaged with different sensory experiences, which has been extended to VR.

“In the ‘80s, you’re using your ears, you’re listening to what other people are saying … in the ‘90s, you’re using your eyes, you’re reading the text on the screen,” Guajardo said. “In contemporary times, you’re using your eyes to see in the VR environment, you’re using your ears to hear in the VR environment.”

Not only does VR use a combination of senses, but it can also use actual touch. Guajardo points to the example of “haptic vests,” or suits that simulate physical feelings — like gunshots, energy, explosions and recoils — in the game.

Guajardo connects the experience of being in VR to a metaphor used by digital humanities academic Janet Murray, who compared being in a game to being underwater.

“Your eyes, you see water. Your skin, you feel water. Your ears, your sound is distorted because you’re in water. All of your senses are completely immersed by water, " Guajardo said. “That is the sensation that people feel when they’re in a video game.”

Video game manufacturers, Guajardo said, frequently use a game’s hyperrealism as a selling point. Even with educational games, Guajardo said, the player is “so immersed … so close to real life.”

Players can learn things from playing the game, but the hyperrealism that leads to good experiences can also create potentially harmful ones.

“The virtual worlds we’re interacting with can be as real as our ordinary physical world,” David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, told The Guardian in 2022. “Virtual reality is genuine reality.”

If a player experiences negative events in a gaming space, they are likely to process it the same way they would a negative event in real life. Psychology Today, in a 2023 article, said these hyperrealistic games have more “damaging consequences” than traditional games. Some studies suggest that the brain cannot differentiate between real and imaginary threats and experiences.

“The exact same stress response kicks in when you imagine danger, also producing cortisol and [adrenaline] and pushing blood around the body,” David Hamilton, an author and scientist, wrote in 2014. “The same chemistry is produced regardless of whether the danger is real or imagined.”

Guo Freeman, a professor at Clemson and director of the Gaming and Mediated Experience Lab, wrote in 2022 how “virtual reality’s focus on creating a simulated immersive experience may cause harassing behaviors to feel more realistic, and therefore potentially more traumatic.”

Psychology Today noted that “trauma resulting from virtual sexual assault does not dissipate once a user removes his or her goggles.” To victims of online sex crimes, the events may feel entirely real to them — and their brains might process them as such.

The psychology of sexual violence in video games

Literature suggests that it is not video games that make players violent, but instead a phenomenon known as the online disinhibition effect.

Writer Aditya Shukla, on his website Cognition Today, wrote in 2023 about how anonymous spaces online create a dissociation from reality. Once separated from reality, a player is also separated from “morals, ethics, and norms” that exist in real life. Online spaces allow for a “lack of eye contact, facial expressions, body language, movement, etc.” that erases the feeling of guilt or shame from engaging in negative behaviors, Shukla wrote.

Guajardo pointed to how this lack of eye contact makes people feel more willing to commit crimes, as they are not directly face-to-face with the victim.

“The more violent aspects of ourselves may come out, because there’s an idea that online spaces are not regulated. There’s a faceless victim,” Guajardo said. “The idea to commit the crime in the first place does not start with the game. That comes from the individual.”

Because of the distance games provide between one’s online behavior and real-world sense of self, as Guajardo wrote in her book, players are free to “experiment with activities that would be considered in conflict” with their usual selves. They create distance from their actions in a game with defenses like “it was only a game.”

In her book, Guajardo cited Gary Alan Fine’s foundational 2002 text “Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Words,” which describes players sometimes engaging in “sexual violence.”

“‘Frequently … female non-player characters [are] raped for sport,’” according to Fine.

For example, the 2018 game “Super Seducer” follows a male protagonist attempting to seduce female non-player characters (NPC) he meets for the first time. Screen grabs show how the player is given choices of what to do to these women; many options involve sexual harassment, such as “look up her shirt” or relating the conversation to “the business between her legs”.

Emily May, founder of the anti-harassment nonprofit “Hollaback!”, told Vice in 2018 that “gender-based violence is on a spectrum — and it starts with games like this. … These games create a culture where violence against women is OK, and in turn, it becomes more OK, and the world becomes less safe for everyone.”

Other games — with titles like “Phantasmagoria,” “RapeLay,” “Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number” and “Rape Day” — feature rape scenes of female characters.

And it’s not just indie games — the best-selling “Grand Theft Auto” series is notorious for its depictions of violence against NPCs. In 2014, one modification of the game allowed players to enter another player’s game as an undressed man, and appear to rape another character. “There is no way to prevent or stop an attack,” according to The Conversation. Such scenes often were recorded and uploaded to YouTube for other gamers to see. (According to HuffPost, YouTube later removed such videos, citing its policy against depictions of sexual violence.)

Guajardo said people may use games as a utopian escape. By immersing oneself in an artificial reality, a player can escape the horrors they face in real life. For women, specifically, they can escape sexism and experience virtual equality.

“If I am running [in a virtual world], I have no more chance of getting attacked by a monster than does a man,” Guajardo said. “This is literally an equal playing field.”

Guajardo expressed her disappointment that the dangers and threats of the real world now exist in VR — noting that, now, there is “no escape” when virtual spaces are permeated with real-life issues.

“To hear that now the virtual world is also a place where being female or inhabiting a female form attracts violence is really depressing,” Guajardo said.

Preparing for cyber sexual assault

Concerns over sexual violence in the virtual world include the question: What can the justice system do?

As yet, the University of Utah has not dealt with a case of virtual sexual violence. Both the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity and University of Utah Police said they have not received any reports of cyber sexual assault.

If campus police were to get such a report, Capt. Brian Lohrke said, “the first thing is we really want to listen to the victim of the crime, and make sure they have the proper resources to deal with it.”

Lohrke said campus police rely on the department’s crime victim advocate to “make sure that the [victim] gets connected with the right resources” before fully delving into the investigation of the crime.

Investigating a cyber sexual assault could be challenging to law enforcement, Lohrke said.

“It’s not a physical attack, not a physical rape, so it may not meet our state statutes,” Lohrke said.

Utah’s statutes for sexual crime — which the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) have compiled in a database — define rape as when someone “has sexual intercourse with another person without the victim’s consent.” Utah’s statutes do not include guidelines for when this occurs in an online, nonphysical space.

If police can determine that a rape or other illegal sexual activity happened, there’s the issue of whether police have jurisdiction to make an arrest. For example, the U. Police are state officers, so their jurisdiction is limited to the state of Utah.

“That is one thing in this cyber world that we really struggle with,” Lohrke said, “because some of the perpetrators are not local.”

If a perpetrator was out of state, an investigation could be handled by federal authorities — of, if the perpetrator was outside the United States, the investigation could also go international.

For a situation on campus, U. Police would reach out to the Office of Equal Opportunity — which would treat virtual sexual harassment the same as physical harassment, said the office’s interim director, Jess Morrison.

“OEO would address reports of online sexual harassment or assault,” Morrison said in a written statement. “Title IX does not create a distinction between sexual harassment occurring in person [versus] online, and the University would promptly respond to the report of exclusively online harassment.”

If the perpetrator was a fellow U student, they would face consequences from the U, Morrison said, citing University Policy 1-012 on nondiscrimination. “That student would be subject to sanctions even if the conduct consisted of exclusively online harassment,” Morrison said.

Even though the issue is new, faculty and staff at the U continue to offer support and advocate for victims of cyber rape and assault.

Guajardo said her “heart goes out to the victim” of the U.K. virtual assault, an event she called “incredibly disheartening.” She said she “absolutely” believes victims of virtual sexual violence deserve justice.

Lohrke said online sexual assault cases are “traumatizing,” and the goal of public safety, first and foremost, is to help the victims. “If anybody has experiences or anything, come to us,” Lohrke said. “Let’s have a conversation about what we can do.”

Lohrke suggested people seeking resources for victims of cyber crimes go to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, at ic3.gov. The website offers links to reporting cyber crimes, as well as information to educate the public on protecting themselves from future internet crimes.

“At least pick up the phone and give us a call. 24/7, our officers are always willing and able to talk,” Lohrke said. University police can be reached at 801-585-COPS (2677), or through their website, police.utah.edu.

Caroline Krum wrote this story as a student at the University of Utah and an investigative writer for The Daily Utah Chronicle. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.

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The massive boom didn’t wake Anton Piddubnyi, and neither did the windows rattling.

It was his wife, Valentyna Piddubna, nine months pregnant at the time, shaking him and yelling, “something has exploded!”

Then another boom sounded in the 5 a.m. darkness on Feb. 24, shaking their fourth-floor apartment, and Piddubnyi, 22, reached for his phone to check the news. The headlines confirmed his fear: Russia had begun its attack on Ukraine.

Piddubnyi — a former Utah Valley University student who moved back to Ukraine last summer — looked out his window and saw “so many people out on the streets, just opening their trunks of cars and just loading it with clothes, trying to leave,” he said. “Everybody was so shocked.”

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dragged on — Thursday will mark eight weeks since it started on Feb. 24 — Piddubnyi recalled the harrowing ordeal he and Valentyna, 24, have endured, fleeing their home and having a baby in the middle of a war zone.

Ukraine to Utah and back

At 17, Piddubnyi enrolled at Utah Valley University to study digital marketing and advertising, fulfilling a long-held dream of going to school in the United States.

Celest Rickers and her family in Orem took Piddubnyi in. Rickers had met him two years earlier, while traveling in Ukraine, where he was their tour guide through Kyiv and surrounding cities.

“We invited him to come live with us when he was 17,” Rickers said. “It has been a joy, and we consider him like a son.”

On his first day at UVU, Piddubnyi met Valentyna Kyzym, who also was studying digital marketing and advertising — and also was from Ukraine. She worked in the Department of English Language Learning, processing the paperwork for the new international students. She also was a coordinator for the International Student Council, organizing social events for students; Piddubnyi attended every Friday night.

“We started taking the same classes, started chatting about homework,” he said. They were friends for nearly three years, then started dating in early 2020. They married in February 2021.

Last summer, the couple moved back to Ukraine, settling just outside Bila Tservka, a city about 50 miles south of Kyiv, the country’s capital.

In the months before the invasion, reports of an increased presence of Russian military at three of Ukraine’s borders raised tensions in the region. There had been chatter in Piddubnyi’s community about Russia’s plan to invade, and some residents even set up bomb shelters.

“Until the last minute, I did not believe such a full-scale invasion could happen,” Piddubnyi said.

When the invasion started Feb. 24, the couple sought shelter, along with Valentyna’s mother and grandmother, with members of their local ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (According to Piddubnyi, Valentyna’s family was baptized in the Latter-day Saint faith in 1998, one of the first families in Bila Tserkva to do so. Piddubnyi joined the church while living in Utah.)

“They had this old basement where they put this mobile fireplace, and heater and some blankets and pillows and mattresses,” Piddubnyi said. More than a dozen people hunkered down in the unfinished basement.

Having a baby in wartime

Before the invasion started, the couple had been preparing for their daughter’s arrival.

The hospital was in Kyiv, 45 minutes away, and staff there at first told them they could begin their stay early. But the couple had to rethink their plans, because they knew Kyiv was likely to be a major target in the Russian attack.

“We cannot go to Kyiv. … We are going to be stuck in hell,” Piddubnyi recalled telling Valentyna at the time.

They could either deliver the baby themselves, or risk the hospital in Bila Tservka. Piddubnyi talked over FaceTime with their midwife, who gave advice on how to deliver the baby. But when Valentyna started having contractions on March 1, the couple went to the hospital, where a makeshift maternity ward was set up in a bomb shelter.

“It was a mess,” Piddubnyi said, adding that non-patients also were seeking refuge at the hospital. “The delivery room was assembled in front of us.”

On March 2, around 3 a.m., hospital staff moved Valentyna to the first floor, so they could monitor their progress. Piddubnyi was down in the underground shelter. As he drifted to sleep, an explosion — from a military airport two kilometers away — rocked the building.

The Russian military, Piddubnyi said, “attacked three or four times with drones and with rockets, with airplanes so it was a massive explosion.”

As the alarms sounded in the hospital, those on the first floor headed for the shelter. In the commotion, Piddubnyi found Valentyna, who was then dilated to 5 centimeters.

The situation was taking its toll on her mental well-being, Piddubnyi said. “It was so hard to watch. … Those were some hard, harsh conditions,” he said.

Later that morning, Valentyna was taken to another makeshift maternity room. Piddubnyi was not allowed in the room. Waiting by the door, he finally heard his baby daughter, Evgenia, let loose her first screams.

“I was so glad that this whole thing ended,” Piddubnyi said.

Fleeing to the west

After their harrowing 55-hour stay at the hospital, the couple returned to the relative safety of the basement shelter, with their new daughter. A few days later, they heard an explosion, followed by the sound of an incoming jet.

“It was a Russian fighter jet being chased by a Ukrainian fighter jet,” Piddubnyi said. “It was flying so low…, we knew if something launches or falls on this house, even the basement would not be able to handle it.”

So, he said, they started making new plans.

“We just kind of prepared for our fate,” he said. “I remember that Valentyna and [her] grandma covered Evgenia with their bodies.”

During a lull in the siege, the family left Bila Tserkva — joining the estimated 10 million Ukrainians who have fled their homes during the invasion, according to BBC.

“We didn’t want to leave,” Piddubnyi said. “We knew if we left, we might be leaving forever.”

The family packed one backpack per person, and moved to a town in western Ukraine, where they are now staying with the parents of a friend the couple met at UVU.

For their friends in Utah, knowing the young family has moved from the center of the fighting has been a relief.

“We have been in consistent contact since the invasion,” Rickers said. “I am very grateful for generous friends that are sheltering them and their extended family.”

Their new town has stayed relatively quiet, Piddubnyi said, though as of April 16, air raid sirens could be heard from time to time.

Watching what comes next

Piddubnyi said the claims made by Russian President Vladimir Putin at the start of the war — that Russia was not targeting civilians, and only aimed to demilitarize Ukraine — are not true.

“They are attacking civilian buildings and pretty much anything in their way,” he said.

He points to the horrific images that surfaced on April 2 from the city of Bucha, 15 miles northwest of Kyiv, that showed hundreds of dead Ukrainians. The images have added to the psychological toll on Ukrainians, and brought international investigations of war crimes.

For Piddubnyi, the horror of Bucha carries an added weight, because he and Valentyna had once considered moving there. “I just can’t sleep because of those images of dead bodies on the streets and buried families,” he said.

Since the invasion began, Piddubnyi said, he has seen overwhelming support among the Ukrainian people for their president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He also has seen many Ukrainians take up arms to join the fight.

“[Putin] thought this war was going to divide us, but it only united us even more. We are so united as a country right now. We are so supportive of each other,” Piddubnyi said. “Even though we are not a part of the European Union, we are fighting for [it]. We are at the doorstep to democracy.”

Looking at the damage Russia has inflicted, Piddubnyi said, people around the world should “understand that Putin is hungry for war” beyond Ukraine.

“Intelligent people who think more widely … understand that it’s not a war only between Russia and Ukraine,” Piddubnyi said. “People think it’s so distant, some imaginary thing, [but] it’s not.”

Piddubnyi said he hopes his fellow Ukrainians – whether in their home country or abroad – can find common ground and allow themselves and others to react to this war in their own way.

“There is no perfect way to react to this,” he said. “If you’re afraid, you have every right to be afraid. If you feel happy, don’t be guilty that you’re happy, because sometimes you need those moments of happiness.”

Piddubnyi said he feels blessed that Evgenia won’t remember the war.

“Knocking on the table, she’s just a healthy baby. She’s sleeping, pooping, eating, screaming sometimes,” he said with a chuckle.

Amie Schaeffer wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.

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Ever since a Loco Burger opened a location less than a block from Salt Lake Community College’s South City campus in January, locals have been eager to try its Mexican-fusion burger.

Before the brick-and-mortar opening at 1702 S. Main St. in Salt Lake City, and the overwhelming support from the community, founder Fernando Cano and his wife, Maria Cano, had a successful food truck that still operates at 5454 S. 4220 West in Kearns.

“On the first three to four days — sold out.” Fernando Cano said about the truck’s opening in 2020. “We were selling around 300 to 400 burgers a day.”

The new Loco Burger is attached to Manny’s a classic Salt Lake City dive bar. It offers a lively environment, nearly always packed with customers ready for a tempting burger. The sounds of sizzling meat from the kitchen accompanies the Latin music coming from behind the counter.

Each burger at Loco Burger has a base of lettuce, tomato, beef patty, avocados, and two cheeses. The crazy twist, Fernando Cano said, comes from the different varieties of pork added to the burger.

“Americans say hamburger, but they don’t have ham on it,” he said.

Cano said his favorite, the “Chapo” burger, is made with a thin slice of pork chop. The name is based on his nickname, a colloquial Spanish word for a short person, given to him by his kids as an affectionate joke about his height.

Cano’s kids also named other menu items, including the Salchi burger (with grilled franks) and the Porky burger (which includes three thick slices of bacon).

Cano said he has told his three children that the business is theirs if they work for it. He acknowledged that his two sons and daughter — ages 14, 12 and 7½ — might have their own aspirations. If they want something different, he said, they need to work for that, too.

The business, Cano said, is family-oriented by design. Even the original recipes for the “Loco” burger and the spicy “Loco” sauce are from his mother. She’s amazed, he said, that her burger is being sold in the eatery.

The yellow storefront in Salt Lake City is the beginning of the company’s brick-and-mortar growth, Cano said. He has two locations under construction and two more in the works. The new locations are in Kearns, South Jordan, Herriman and Salt Lake City’s Rose Park neighborhood.

The new Kearns location, he said, will feature a collection of Mexican hot dogs and milkshakes, Cano said.

Ultimately, Cano said, he would like to see Loco Burger grow into a national chain. His first goal, though, is to open 20 locations across Utah.

“I’ll try to involve my kids in this business because I think that’s good business,” he said. “You have to do something if you want something, nothing is free.”

Maria Cano said she has even bigger dreams for the company.

“My vision of Loco Burger is definitely bigger than just the states, because of its uniqueness,” she said. “We want to share it with everybody.”

The Canos said they believe in investing in themselves and investing in their team. They said they know they couldn’t do it alone, and are grateful for the opportunities they’ve had in Utah and in the United States. Fernando Cano emigrated from Mexico in 2003. He later met Maria, and the two married in 2008.

“I give my life for this country because this country gives me everything,” Fernando Cano said.

Tyffton Bowman wrote this story as a journalism student at Salt Lake Community College. It is published as part of a new collaborative including nonprofits Amplify Utah and The Salt Lake Tribune.

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