Legal Niches

Rapelay Furor Hits Italy

By pete_gallagher

It's the game that has enraged populaces around the world and now Italy has apparently noticed that Rapelay can indeed be found on the Internet.

Italian newspaper Il Corriere (translation here) has a story up which features an assemblage of important types screaming about the game being just a series of tubes away from common citizens.

Giorgia Meloni, Minister of Youth, said that he would speak to Postal and Communications Police to get the game removed from the Net, while the Mayor of Rome himself, Gianni Alemanno, called for the game to be banned.

Gabriella Moscatelli, President of Telefono Rosa, a group that fights violence against women, also came out against the availability of Rapelay, saying that it was an 'incitement to commit a crime.'

Also joining in the condemnation of Rapelay were Barbara Saltamartini from the People of Freedom (PDL) party and Dorina Bianchi of the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats (UDC), who said something along the lines of 'while spending commitment and energy to propose and promote policies to support women, we discover that the creators of a video game put the same amount of commitment to train a generation of rapists. I drop my arms.

GP: Just to clarify, the premise for the game is sick, there's no doubt about that. The furor that continually crops over it each time a country 'discovers' it however is bizarre, as are the subsequent attempts to scrub it from the Internet. Rapelay is definitely a uniter, in that it has virtually zero backers (other than Penn Jillette perhaps), making it the ultimate safe target for attack."

Thanks to reader ItaliAnon for the link and translation assistance!

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on February 11, 2010 (boomark / email).