WARNING: Talks about sexual abuse
WOMEN worldwide are horrified after German authorities revealed a Telegram chat group which shared stories and instructions of committing sexual assaults in January 2025.
The group on the social media and messaging application, Telegram, have over 70,000 members. They appear to be citizens of various countries, and use English as their medium of communication.
These allegations surfaced during a case trial in Avignon, France, where a man named Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison for drugging his wife to engage her in non-consexual sex. He also offered her to other men online for rape and assault.
Dominique Pelicot’s crime took place for years. Digital recordings of the assault were used as evidence to implicate 50 other men, who the court also found guilty.
Meanwhile, a year-long investigation of German media ARD and its STRG_F investigative team revealed how the rape chat groups operate.
Users had been swapping ‘tips’ on how to sedate their partners, including sharing links to online shops where they could buy these sedatives in the guise of a hair product.
On the other hand, Telegram assured authorities that they’re doing their part to take action against such groups.
“Telegram has a zero-tolerance policy towards misuse of its platform. All users caught doing so will be blocked immediately,” they said in a statement.
But according to ARD’s investigation, although some groups were deactivated, it is still easy for the users to just send links to a new group.
In recent years, German investigators said they had some success in convincing Telegram to share its data for cases that involve terrorism and the production of child sex abuse contents in the platform.
Criminal activities on Telegram
Telegram has been the subject of many investigations due to the proliferation of criminal offenders in the platform.
It was founded in 2013, by the Russian tech billionaire Pavel Durov, and was banned in Russia in 2018 through 2021, according to Forbes.
In South Korea, it was used to host “humiliation” chat rooms, where ‘deep fakes’— or videos digitally altered to make someone look like another person— featuring women and girls were spread.
But this wasn’t the first time Telegram was used to host chat rooms like these in the country. In 2019, it was found out that a chat room in the platform was being used to force women and children to share sexually exposed videos of themselves.
According to the BBC, the South Korean authorities asked Telegram to help with its investigation, but the latter refused to do so. It denied all their seven requests to cooperate with the investigation, although the ringleader was eventually sentenced to 40 years in jail.
In August 2024, Durov was arrested in France on charges of failing to address the legal concerns about the spread of illegal contents in the platform.
He had denied the allegations but is currently placed under house arrest. He promised that the platform would do more to pursue the “problematic content” in it.
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