[This report from Psychology Today focuses directly and explicitly on the role of presence in the important and serious phenomenon of harassment in virtual environments. Referencing a qualitative research study, it highlights some of the practical and ethical implications of using both media form and content to provide cues that in the real (nonmediated) world represent and reinforce power dynamics and that in mediated settings can be deeply upsetting. –Matthew]

Why Harassment in Virtual Reality Feels Real (Even When It’s Not)

Subtle cues in VR can feel invasive and trigger real discomfort.

By Matilde Tassinari Ph.D., a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, specializing in the integration of virtual reality and social psychology, with a focus on using immersive technologies to create more equal societies
Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
September 15, 2025

You log into a virtual world. Your body is digital: it can’t be touched, it doesn’t have a scent. And yet, someone leans in too close. Their avatar stares, their avatar’s hand reaches toward your face. You feel invaded. You haven’t been physically touched, but something more elusive, and no less real, has happened.

This is not the future; it’s the present of immersive technology.

In a recent study conducted at Clemson University, researcher Guo Freeman and colleagues examined what many in tech have been reluctant to confront: Harassment in virtual reality is possible, and it feels deeply real. How we respond to it may have less to do with virtual environments themselves than with the power of psychological presence.

The team conducted in-depth interviews with 17 people who had encountered harassment in virtual reality. These weren’t surveys or quick polls, but detailed, open-ended conversations, designed to capture the texture of lived experience. What emerged was clear: Harassment in VR is not “just virtual.” For those on the receiving end, it feels real, not because of what the environment is made of, but because of what the brain makes of the environment.

What exactly do we mean when we say someone is “harassed” in VR? In the physical world, harassment often relies on touch, verbal aggression, or intimidation. But in immersive environments, the rules are fuzzier. When a digital avatar steps too close or holds a stare, there’s no physical contact, but the psychological signals remain intact.

The study puts a spotlight on this gap: It was not always the content of the interaction that made people uncomfortable, but rather the form. The timing and the proximity are both familiar markers of dominance or intrusion in real-life interaction, and retain their power in virtual space.

Why? Because users aren’t seeing a screen, but inhabiting a body. The first-person perspective, combined with head-tracked motion and 3D spatial audio, creates what psychologists call “place illusion” and “plausibility.” The result is a cognitive dissonance: Your brain knows it’s virtual, but your body responds as if it were real.

One of the most striking themes in the study was how bodily presence, even without a physical body, intensified the experience of harassment. Participants described unwanted proximity, leering stares, and being cornered or followed. Notably, most of these actions involved no physical contact.

As one participant put it, “It felt like it was in my face.” That sensation of personal space being violated is one of the key insights of the study. In virtual reality, even a gesture or stare can feel physically invasive, because the perceptual system is deeply engaged. The headset might be plastic, but the brain treats the experience as embodied.

A striking insight from the study is that harassment in VR doesn’t occur in a vacuum, but rather reflects and reproduces the same social hierarchies and exclusions found offline. Participants who identified as part of marginalized groups reported that their experiences in virtual environments often mirrored the kinds of discrimination they faced in real life.

Some described being targeted based on perceived gender, race, or sexuality. For these participants, the virtual world didn’t feel like an escape, but an extension of the biases they navigate every day.

One participant explained that they experienced harassment online because of the combination of their avatar wearing a dress and their voice being masculine. Another felt their accent or skin tone, as expressed through their avatar or voice, marked them as different and made them a target. Others shared that even when harassment was not explicitly discriminatory, it was shaped by power dynamics that echoed real-world experiences of marginalization.

The study points to a troubling but important reality: Immersive technology doesn’t neutralize social inequality. It can actually reproduce or even intensify it.

Much of the public conversation around harassment in VR has focused on platform design: Adding personal space bubbles or letting users mute or block others, or implementing “safe zones” where avatars can’t interact. These are important features, but they miss the more insidious challenge revealed by the study: Harassment is a behavioral problem, but it’s also a perceptual one.

In immersive spaces, even subtle, scripted interactions can be experienced as intrusive, and that’s not something a safety bubble alone can fix. It suggests that VR designers and researchers need to start thinking beyond moderation tools and toward understanding how embodiment and presence affect vulnerability.

This qualitative work also suggests that harassment in VR goes beyond being an extension of real-world abuse into digital space, emerging instead as a new phenomenon, shaped by the properties of immersive environments. In these spaces, the boundary between presence and performance blurs, and users may behave differently, possibly emboldened by anonymity, but also due to their sense of “being there” shifting their inhibitions, or their sense of what counts as appropriate social behavior.

In short, we’re not just talking about virtual harassment. We’re talking about embodied harassment, and we’re only beginning to understand what that means.

Virtual reality has extraordinary potential: for education, for empathy, for connection across boundaries. But if we’re going to invite people to step into new realities, we must also take responsibility for what happens once they’re there. It calls for mindful design, accountability, and most of all, a new ethics of presence.

References

Freeman, G., Zamanifard, S., Maloney, D., & Acena, D. (2022). Disturbing the peace: Experiencing and mitigating emerging harassment in social virtual reality. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW1), 1-30. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3512932