I am looking to start a campaign to deal with the normalisation of “rape roleplay” on social media, specifically Tiktok. This year, 37.2% of Tiktok users are aged ten (yes, TEN) to nineteen, which is the largest age group on the platform.

This issue was brought to my attention by a rape joke by a well known tattoo artist, @uglynorth, posted to Tiktok. The video he posted read “I asked my girlfriend if she wanted to try r*pe play. She said no. We had a great time”. Not only is this on a public profile for anyone to see, it is also very clearly confusing the concept of consent. It is worth mentioning his nazi reference “joke”  videos were taken down within an hour of being reported, but the rape roleplay video - reported the day he uploaded it - has been left up for four days at the time of writing, and has been viewed 261.5Ktimes, and liked 39.7K times.

Not only do these kinds of jokes perpetuate rape culture and sexual abuse, such normalisation also causes issues in terms of police response (or lack thereof) toward abusers, and even murderers [See “We Can’t Consent To This” campaign for more on this].

BDSM and sexual role play are intensely complex situations that shouldn’t be normalised as mainstream. If consenting adults wish to post this kind of content, Tiktok should be held accountable for making sure these profiles are private, and vetting their followers to be 18+, in the same way pornographic websites are obliged to. It should also be accompanied with appropriate education around consent - especially when adults are involved in distributing this kind of content on a social media platform full of teenagers and young people. 

I want to make sure that Tiktok are held accountable for inadequate censorship of videos, as their platform is used predominantly by teens, many of whom are underage.

I believe the growing trend for sexual content distributed by adults on Tiktok is disturbing at best, and dangerous at worst, and I know many others will agree.

Please sign this petition to draw Tiktok’s attention to this issue, and to show them it is unacceptable.

[statistics on Tiktok users age from statista.com]