From the Rape Academy to Your Living Room
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. This week, we're talking about a CNN investigation that should have stopped everyone in their tracks and what it says about women's psychological safety that for a lot of men, it didn't stop them in their tracks. So what was actually found? In March, CNN published the results of a months long investigation into what it called an online rape academy a network of men using encrypted platforms to coordinate the drugging and sexual assault of their partners, sharing footage of those assaults, and coaching each other on how to avoid detection.
Leslie Poston:The telegram group at the center of the investigation, called ZZZ, had nearly 1,000 users. Inside it, men from around the world exchanged dosages, discussed which substances left the least trace in a toxicology screen, advertised live streams of unconscious women being harmed for $20 a viewer, and paid in cryptocurrency to remain anonymous. One user claimed to be running a business out of a Spanish enclave in North Africa, selling tasteless, odorless sleeping liquid for $175 a bottle, shipping anywhere in the world. His sales pitch was straightforward: Your wife won't feel anything, and your wife won't remember anything. That telegram group has since been taken down, but Motherless, a US hosted pornography site that describes itself as a moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever, is still fully public and operational, which is where many of these men found each other.
Leslie Poston:It had approximately 62,000,000 visits in February, and the number of visits have only increased month over month since this investigation was released. The website hosts more than 20,000 videos tagged with terms like PassedOut and EyeCheck, the latter referring to the practice of lifting a sedated woman's eyelids to confirm she's unconscious before or during an assault. Some of those videos have surpassed 50,000 views each. The site is still up. The content is still there and public.
Leslie Poston:This isn't a historical footnote, this is the current situation. For anyone who followed the Dominique Pelicot trial in France, none of the underlying mechanics here are surprising, and that's exactly my point. Pelicot used a chat room called Without Her Knowledge to recruit dozens of men to rape his wife, Giselle, while she was drugged unconscious. She was raped more than 200 times by 70 men over the course of years. After that trial, Giselle Pellico stood in that courtroom and said shame must change sides.
Leslie Poston:The reasonable expectation was that the world had now been confronted with something it couldn't ignore any longer. But what the CNN investigation shows is that this network didn't disappear. It just migrated, adapted, and kept growing. You're seeing this network expand onto social media with the current TikTok trend where young men are training how to physically assault women who tell them no or refuse to give them their phone number. When the CNN story broke, something very predictable happened.
Leslie Poston:A version of the story spread on social media, claiming that 62,000,000 men had attended the rape academy. That number is imprecise, as social media does, it distorts things. That 62,000,000 represents total site visits to motherless, not members of the ZZZ group specifically. But the all too predictable response from a significant portion of men online was to make that inaccuracy the story. What I want to focus on is what that pivot reveals to us.
Leslie Poston:Because the impulse to reach for a statistical objection when confronted with evidence of organized sexual violence against women isn't about accuracy. It's kind of a cultural reflex. It's basically rape culture doing what rape culture does, finding the nearest available reason to look somewhere other than directly at the harm being done. A significant portion of the male dominated discourse around this story has shifted almost entirely to this numbers debate. Whether it was 62,000,000 or a thousand, whether attended was the right word, whether the framing was fair, the story became a debate about journalistic precision.
Leslie Poston:And the actual content of the journalism, the infrastructure of coordinated sexual violence against women, the site that's still online right now has receded into the background. This is a textbook example of what psychologist Albert Bandura called moral disengagement. Long time listeners will recognize that term from previous episodes. Bandura's research maps out the cognitive strategies people use to avoid confronting information that conflicts with their self image as a decent person. One of those strategies is distortion of scale minimizing how widespread or serious something is.
Leslie Poston:Another is displacement of responsibility, or focusing on a procedural problem, like an inaccurate statistic, rather than an underlying harm. Semantic derailment, as I call it, does both at once. You signal that you care about accuracy. You position yourself as a careful thinker, but you successfully avoid sitting with what the story is actually about. It's not a conscious conspiracy.
Leslie Poston:It's more like a cognitive escape hatch. And people who use it don't necessarily realize that that's what they're doing. The problem is that it doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's happening in living rooms, at dinner tables, in the office, in Slack channels, and in the text thread where someone shares the CNN story and a man immediately responds with, Well, actually, to be fair, that sixty two million number is misleading. The women in those spaces are watching their pain and trauma get minimized in real time.
Leslie Poston:Jennifer Fried's betrayal trauma theory was developed to explain why the source of trauma matters as much as the trauma itself. Her research shows that when harm comes from someone a person depends on or trusts like a partner, parent, or maybe an institution the psychological damage is compounded in specific ways. The nervous system has to manage a particularly impossible math. The person I need is also the person who hurt me or who won't acknowledge that I'm hurt. One of the documented adaptations to this bind is what Freud called betrayal blindness, a kind of motivated not knowing that helps a person stay functional in a relationship they can't safely leave.
Leslie Poston:What I'd like to extend that framework to cover is what happens when the betrayal is not physical but is epistemic. When the men in a woman's life respond to documented evidence of organized violence against women by litigating footnotes, they're communicating something maybe not necessarily intentionally, but definitely clearly about whose reality gets taken seriously. For women who are survivors of drug facilitated assault or partner rape specifically, watching the people around them retreat into semantic debate isn't an abstract political frustration. It's a direct echo of what dismissal felt like the first time. Zoe Watts, one of the survivors CNN interviewed, described her ex husband's confession as a list of wrongdoings delivered like a shopping list.
Leslie Poston:She also described people responding to her disclosure with, but he's your husband, or but you weren't away, so it's not the same. The pivot to, well, technically, the 62,000,000 figure is misleading, is just a different register of the same move. It centers the discomfort of the person responding over the reality of the person affected. Research on social invalidation or consistently shows that it increases psychological distress, deepens shame, and makes future disclosure less likely. And this matters practically because one of the most significant barriers to women reporting sexual violence to anyone, whether that's their partner, an employer, or maybe law enforcement, is the anticipation of exactly this response.
Leslie Poston:Every time a man in a woman's life demonstrates that his first instinct is to find the flaw in the framing rather than to reckon with the content of what he's being told, he's contributing to the environment where she already knows what disclosure will cost her. There's also the cumulative weight of hypervigilance to consider. Women who have experienced assault or who live with an ongoing awareness of their own vulnerability expend significant cognitive and emotional resources on assessing safety. They're reading situations, reading people, making constant low level calculations about who around them is trustworthy. That mental and emotional labor is exhausting and remains largely invisible.
Leslie Poston:A week like this one, where a story about organized assault becomes a discourse about traffic statistics, adds to that load in concrete ways. It's one more data point confirming that the environment is not safe, and that the people around you will not necessarily be where you need them to be. It also signals that managing your own distress will fall on you. I want to be clear about what I'm trying to say in this episode. The men in the ZZZ group and the men who spent last week arguing about website metrics are not separate phenomena.
Leslie Poston:They are the same system, operating at different points on the same continuum. The coordinated sexual violence that CNN exposed exists and persists because the social environment around it keeps producing permission. Not always explicit, not always conscious, but always consistent. Saying boys will be boys is permission. Saying well actually, to be fair, the 62,000,000 number is misleading is permission.
Leslie Poston:Doubting any woman who comes forward is permission. Every time the response to evidence of organized harm is to find a procedural objection, the men doing the harming get to keep doing it. They're counting on exactly that. The Pelico case made this visible in a courtroom. 70 men total, 50 of whom were in the lawsuit, who each in their own way found a reason that what they were doing was, oh, not really as harmful as she said it was.
Leslie Poston:The men arguing statistics last week are further down that continuum, but they're still on it. And that continuum has real consequences for women. The infrastructure of violence that the CNN investigation exposed persists in part because the social environment around it keeps producing reasons to not look directly at it. Platforms decline to moderate because the legal liability is unclear. Governments decline to regulate because the political will isn't there.
Leslie Poston:And in the smaller, everyday version of the same dynamic, men in women's lives decline to fully engage with what a story like this means, because engaging fully feels uncomfortable. Beth Richie's work on gender entrapment and community collusion makes the case that violence against women doesn't persist despite the people around it, it persists through them. Ritchie argues that community silence is not a passive failure to act, but an active force one that creates the social conditions perpetrators need to operate and to continue. The semantic pivot is part of that force. It's not a neutral failure to engage it's a small, socially acceptable act of cover.
Leslie Poston:It makes the story manageable, keeps the discomfort contained, and sends a clear signal to anyone paying attention about how much scrutiny this particular kind of harm will actually receive. Perpetrators are not oblivious to that signal they're relying on it. What a genuine response looks like is actually not that complicated, even if it's uncomfortable. It means sitting with the discomfort long enough to ask what the story means for the women in your life. It means noticing when your first instinct is to fact check the framing rather than reckon with the substance, and ask yourself what that instinct is protecting you from.
Leslie Poston:It means understanding that the website Motherless is still online, and that a woman you know may be living with a man who has visited it, and she may have no idea. Giselle Poston said shame must change sides, and I agree. It will take immense and continuous social pressure to make that happen. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston.
Leslie Poston:Until next time, stay curious, and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And if you think someone would benefit from listening to this episode, send them a link.
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