Rape chat victim’s friend laughed as he showed her sexually violent messages

A rape chat victim has told of how her friend joked as he scrolled through hundreds of sexually violent message about her.

Anna, not her real name, discovered the horrific comments on the Facebook group at the centre of the Warwick University rape chat scandal after spotting explicit messages on her friend’s laptop.

He laughed it off and told her if she thought ‘that was bad, you might want to see our other lads’ chat’.

Her close friend then took her through a year and a half worth of rape threats against her and other female coursemates.

Anna, who was 19 at the time, told the BBC: ‘They were talking about a fellow student. They were talking about abducting her, chaining her to the bed, making her urinate herself and then sleep in it.’

Anna went on to search her own name to discovered she had been mentioned hundreds of times in graphic descriptions by male pals she trusted.

The students had named each other after famous serial killers and rapist and talked about gang rape and genital mutilation.

One of the group said: ‘Rape the whole flat to teach them a lesson’, while another said: ‘Oh god. I would hate to be in the firing line if I had a vagina.’

Her friend dismissed the content as ‘how boys talk’ and said it was all a joke.

However, as Anna got more and more upset he realised how serious some of the messages were and told her he had shown her to protect her.

Anna told a BBC documentary into the scandal how close she was with him at the time and said he had even celebrated Christmas with her family at one point.

The humanities student added: ‘I didn’t know what to do because these people [in the chat] were a huge part of my life, and I didn’t want to lose my friends.’

However, she said the ordeal gave her ‘anxiety and panic attacks’ which made her realise she had to say something in order to be able to go return to the university.

The complaint from Anna and a female friend, who was also targeted in the chat, led to an internal investigation which saw one student expelled and given a lifetime campus ban.

Two others were given 10-year bans. However, those where later reduces to one 12 months.

One year on, The Warwick Uni Rape Chat Scandal documentary investigates what went wrong at Warwick.