The 'Online Rape Academy' Is One of Many

What is the 'online rape academy'?

In short: every woman's worst nightmare. Perhaps a nightmare you had not even thought of yet.

In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot become an icon of feminism when she waived her right to anonymity, and bravely allowed her rape trial to be public. She said she wanted everyone to see the crimes that were committed against her. What makes her trial all the more sickening is that millions of people already had. Her husband had been drugging her, raping her, and filming it over their 50 years of marriage. He had even invited over 80 men to join him (Le Monde, 2026).

Pelicot's case is horrifying, to say the least. It makes my blood run cold. But as a society, we would be naive to say that the signs were not there. The myth that rape is something that happens by a strange man in a dark alley is now dangerous to perpetuate, because it encourages women to avert their gaze from the much closer danger. 1 in 3 women worldwide are victims of intimate partner violence (IPV), meaning that their sexual assaulter was their romantic partner. This amounts to 840 million women worldwide (World Health Organisation, 2025). If the number of women who had experienced IPV across the globe gathered together and formed a country, it would be more populous than the USA or the whole of Europe (US Census Bureau, 2026; Worldometer, 2026).

In the UK, the most common perpetrator of a rape against a woman is an intimate partner (48%), and the most common perpetator of other sexual assaults is a known aquaintance (32%). In fact, after accounting for boyfriends, husbands, step-fathers, uncles, priests, teachers, family friends etc., only 9% of rapes are committed by a stranger (ONS, 2025).

In the 'Online Rape Academy', the portmanteau for a chat on an online pornography distributer called 'Motherless', more than 20,000 videos were uploaded of men drugging and raping their wives (CNN, 2026). The reason for the word 'academy', was after the testimony of French lawmaker Sandrine Josso, who was drugged by a former French senator. She called them "schools of violence", "where every subject is taught" (ibid.). Subjects like how many drugs to slip into your wife's drink, how to prove to your viewers that she is unconscious, or how to make revenue from your streams. All the examples below are real messages discovered by CNN.

The content is horrendous: men taking advice from strangers to drug and rape their wives, and the world being full of women who trust their husbands only to find themselves victims of rape and international humiliation.

But this is far from being the first time. Reddit hosted groups of up to 20,000 men selling nude or semi-dressed photographs of women along with their postcodes and contact details, with comments explicitly declaring "I want to rape this b****" (Plaha, 2022). They are blatantly self-aware. Telegram had groups of up to 200,000 men sharing deep fake pornographic images adapted from women's social media posts (Mackenzie and Choi, 2024). In fact, deep fake non-consensual pornography is so common that it represents 96% of all uses of deep fake technology, with videos amassing over 100 million views (Ajder et al., 2019). On all platforms, at all times, there are men performing these crimes and publicising them online, lauded by hundreds of thousands more.

Furthermore, streaming sex crimes do not just advertise the individual crime itself; it spawns new ones. It encourages men everywhere to commit sexual violence, and teaches them that this is acceptable, even mainstream behaviour. Elizabeth Marshall and Leigh Gilmore argue that visual media "does not merely document, it materialises" (Marshall & Gilmore, 2015). By streaming a sexual assault of a drugged wife, a woman who trusted and loved her abuser, it materialises the crime as an example to others. It tells men that not only are women objects to be treated as inanimate sex dolls, but that this is not just a hypothetical outlook; it teaches them to view the women close to them this way, and grooms them into violating their trust. In essence, it breeds a new generation of sex offenders, and will be visible in the IPV sex crime statistics of the years ahead.

The 'online rape academy' is a devastating indictment of modern society: one in which technology has expanded faster than legislation, and where men can learn how to be a sex offender as easily as learning how to hang a photo. However, it is too simple to suggest that this discovery is a unique moment of horror. These websites and chatrooms are all around us.

It is only in unlearning dangerous myths surrounding sexual assault that women can cease to be veiled from the truth, and finally shield themselves from the crime.

by Camille Saunders

Bibliography in chronological order

'Gisèle Pelicot publishes memoirs after mass rape trial', (2026), Le Monde with Agence France Press. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/global-issues/article/2026/02/11/gisele-pelicot-publishes-memoirs-after-mass-rape-trial_6750362_199.html

'Lifetime toll: 840 million women faced partner or sexual violence', (2025), World Health Organisation. https://www.who.int/news/item/19-11-2025-lifetime-toll--840-million-women-faced-partner-or-sexual-violence

'U.S. and World Population Clock', (2026), United States Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/popclock/#:~:text=select date,Learn More | Download and Share

'Europe Population (Live)', (2026), Worldometer. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-population/

'Sexual offences victim characteristics, England and Wales: year ending March 2025', (2025), Office for National Statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/sexualoffencesvictimcharacteristicsenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2025#relationship-to-perpetrator

VANDOORNE, Saskya, FOX, Kara, KENNEDY, Niamh, STUBBS, Eleanor, CHACON, Marco, 'Exposing a global 'rape academy'', (2026), CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-assault-online-vis-intl/index.html

PLAHA, M., (2022), ‘Inside the secret world of trading nudes’, BBC, 22nd August.
Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62564028

MACKENZIE, J., CHOI, L., (2024), ‘Inside the deepfake porn crisis engulfing Korean schools’, BBC, 3rd September.
Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpdlpj9zn9go