‘He had a lot of profiles’: The rise of online drug-facilitated rape gangs

Warning: This story includes descriptions of sexual assault that some readers will find disturbing.Zoe Watts’s 16-year marriage to a man she met when she was 17 was abusive. But she had no idea of the depths of his mistreatment until one Sunday.“He sat me down one evening and told me what he was doing. I think he always had a thing for risky behaviour, and this was part of this cat-and-mouse game he was playing with me,” Watts told Al Jazeera from Devon, England. “It was quite tumultuous, but I didn’t know what he was doing to me.”Her husband admitted he was crushing sleeping pills into her tea and then taking advantage of her sedated state to take photos and videos. It was only later that she realised she had been raped. In 2022, her now-ex-husband was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment.“He had a lot of online profiles, and that’s where my images [went],” she said.In May, Watts and another survivor, Amanda Stanhope, launched a campaign, #EndEyeCheck, against drug-facilitated sexual assault and its online dissemination.A subgenre of pornography, in which one of the parties appears to be asleep or otherwise unconscious – possibly knocked out through drugs – caters to an atypical se...