Universities Need to Address Sexual Harassment in the Gaming They Sponsor

Colleges and universities are investing heavily in “esports”—awarding hefty gaming scholarships, fielding competitive esports teams, and building on-campus esports arenas. They are not, however, tackling—or even considering—the sexual cyberviolence, harassment and technology-enabled abuse that regularly occur in electronic gaming.

Collegiate gaming grew exponentially during the pandemic. Many schools, including the university at which I teach and direct a domestic violence law clinic, promoted gaming to connect socially distanced students to campus and each other. Today, nearly 250 U.S. colleges and universities run strong varsity collegiate esports programs. Another 900 schools offer some form of esports.

While 97 percent of U.S. teenagers play video games, white males markedly dominate scholastic-based esports and are the primary recipients of esports scholarships. Though women account for more than half of all college graduates, collegiate gaming continues to treat them as a niche market. Within gaming itself, they are treated much worse.

Gaming is the most inequitable community in terms of its treatment of women, research shows. To escape rampant online harassment, nearly 70 percent of female gamers hide their gender identity and avoid verbal communication with other players. One fifth of female-identifying gamers have entirely left gaming as a result of online abuse.

Rather than waiting for a global #EToo movement, schools should anticipate the all-too-foreseeable issues of sexual harassment and violence in gaming and esports and intentionally act to prevent abuse.

Teamwork and relationship-building are common aspects of gaming, but so are hypermasculine atmospheres, rife with hostility, misogyny and racist attacks. Women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals and non-gender-conforming people are particularly targeted and harassed. Well-known esports games and scholarship providers, like League of Legends, are noted for “vicious” player communities and cycles of “toxic behavior.”

Avatar rapes, including recent reports of sexual assaults in the metaverse, have profoundly affected those who are victimized. Even when sexual violence is not built into a game’s plot, some gamers engage in sexually violating acts, expecting other gamers to brush off the experience as a joke or part of game play, rather than recognizing the harm.

When gender, race or ethnicity cues are exposed in game play, those not fitting the dominant white male identity are often harassed. Women of color report barrages of racist and gendered hatred and slurs when using their voices in games. Men of color report navigating online racism through strategies of silence and attempting emotional desensitization to racism. Silencing oneself and gender-switching result in women and nonbinary individuals being invisible in gaming and disadvantaged in game play.

Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, requires schools to prevent and respond to sexual harassment and sexual violence. The U.S. Supreme Court, with its 1999 opinion in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, ruled that student-on-student sexual harassment is a form of sex-based discrimination under Title IX. As universities fund and promote esports, gender parity under that law is not just about offering scholarships and team positions to nonmale players. With the 2011 Kowalski v. Berkeley County Schools decision, a federal appeals court upheld school administrators’ punishment of online bullying and sexual harassment by students, regardless of location.

Even under the Trump administration’s weakened Title IX regulations, sexual harassment in gaming has been so pervasive that schools should anticipate students being “vulnerable to abuse,” which opens colleges to sanctions. President Biden’s new Title IX civil rights rules will reinstate and strengthen protections to guarantee education free from sexual violence. Schools should take note.

The gaming environment is instantaneous, escalates quickly, and often is anonymous and not tied to a specific physical location, so schools and students have to actively build and maintain healthier cultures in gaming. Fortunately, research shows that educating gamers about victims’ experiences of harassment in games and corresponding negative harms mitigates harassment.

Esports programs should involve their schools’ Title IX and diversity, equity and inclusion officers in navigating the intersection of Title IX, gaming content and behavior while gaming, including when using school equipment or facilities, gaming through school-sponsored events and representing a school as an esports athlete or scholarship recipient. Because substantial cyber harassment occurs in the presence of peers, which carries its own trauma, programs should teach bystander skills and ways for students to respond and intervene.

Schools should be motivated both by Title IX mandates and their own commitments to equity and inclusion to make this happen. The recent #MeToo movement creates opportunities for awareness and action concerning gender-based violence. The Black Lives Matter movement provides an imperative for schools to work to eradicate anti-Black racism and address intersectional oppressions. These calls to action, largely led by youth, can drive inclusive gaming programs.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Jane K. Stoever is a professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, where she directs the UCI Law Domestic Violence Clinic and the UCI Initiative to End Family Violence. She has received multiple awards for her teen dating violence prevention programs and presented her research on esports to the White House’s Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse.

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