On Predator Culture, the language that hides it, and the only education that changes the ground it grows on.
By: Lissette Brassac Fitzgerald
⚠ TRIGGER WARNING
Trigger Warning — and I want to address that phrase directly before we go any further. “Trigger Warning” has become a reflex. A buffer between the reader and the reality. Used with good intentions — always — it has also quietly become permission to look away. I am using it here because some of what follows is genuinely difficult. But I want to be honest: I am tired — and I know I am not alone in this — of watching the language we built to protect those hurt get quietly repurposed to protect the abuser. I’m going to be direct and unapologetic.
The Number That Should Stop You Cold
There is roughly an 85–94% probability that someone in your immediate social circle — a friend, a coworker, a brother, a teammate — visited what CNN investigators described as an “online r*** academy” this past February (2026). (I am censoring certain words throughout this piece so it doesn’t get taken down. That is not an editorial choice. It is a structural problem I will address shortly.)
Here is where that number comes from. Motherless.com — a site hosting over 20,000 videos tagged as “sleep content,” meaning recordings of women being s***************** while unconscious — received 62 million visits in February 2026 alone. CNN’s months-long investigation confirmed that the core audience is US-based — more than half the visitors. With approximately 131 million adult men in the U.S., that places roughly 1 in 4 adult American men on that site last month. In a social circle of 10 men, the probability that at least one of them was there sits between 85 and 94%.
This is not abstract. This is your life. This is your lunch table, your group chat, your family dinner.
This Is Not New. It Never Was.
The “Zzz” Telegram group at the center of CNN’s investigation used tags like “#passedout,” “#eyecheck,” and “sleep.” Not r***. Not a******. Just sleep. A man in Ceuta advertised sedation liquids for 150 euros a bottle, promising targets “won’t feel anything and won’t remember anything.” Another sold livestreams of unconscious women being a******** for $20 a viewer, with cryptocurrency. The language was always careful. The intent never was.
This is a pattern with a long history. Starting in the 1950s, alt-weekly newspapers like the Village Voice built their classified back pages into a coded marketplace. “Roses” meant payment. “GFE” implied a commercial transaction. “New in town” was sometimes a trafficking signal. The coded language provided just enough legal ambiguity that federal judges upheld the ads’ First Amendment protections for decades.
When Backpage — the digital successor to those back pages — faced pressure, it implemented a word-stripping filter that automatically removed terms like “r***”, “young,” “teenage,” and “innocent” from ads before publication. As a U.S. Senate investigation documented, the filter changed nothing about the nature of the transactions. It just made the ads look “cleaner than ever.” Backpage processed millions of ads and generated hundreds of millions in revenue before federal authorities seized it in 2018 — but the ecosystem it built did not disappear. It adapted. It found new platforms, new tags, new words.
The perpetrators have always found other language to hide behind. They are fluent in it. The question is why the people trying to stop them keep getting silenced.
Two Systems With Good Intentions. One Shared Result.
I want to be careful here, because I believe in both of the things I am about to critique.
The first is trauma-informed language. Built to protect survivors from re-traumatization, it has trained an entire generation of advocates, educators, and institutions to speak about s************** in euphemism: “harmful behavior,” “unhealthy patterns,” “concerning content.” (Censored again — the irony is intentional.) Gentleness has a place. But when it becomes the only register, we lose the ability to call a “r*** academy” by as what it is: a rape academy. I hope that hits differently. It has to.
The behavior doesn’t disappear because you censor the language. It simply retreats deeper into the shadows, protected now not by its perpetrators’ careful language, but by ours.
The second is algorithmic censorship. When I write the words s*********** or r*** in a post — even to condemn them — this content gets throttled, flagged, or removed. Survivors who share their stories get shadowbanned. Educators who try to name the problem get silenced. Meanwhile, the communities we are trying to expose operate largely undisturbed: they learned long ago to use sanitized, clinical tags, emoji codes, and harmless-sounding category names. The platform’s filters were never built to catch “#eyecheck.” They were built to catch us.
This is not a conspiracy. It is an emergent, structural irony: the tools we built to protect the vulnerable have been captured — invisibly — to protect the behavior instead.
Men Are Not the Villains. Predator Culture Is.
I want to say this clearly, because it matters to everything that follows:
Men are not the villains in this story — Predator Culture is.
The men who visited that site, who participated in those groups, who built and sustained that ecosystem — they did not arrive there from nowhere. They were raised inside structures that never gave them a language for connection, dignity, accountability, or what healthy intimacy actually looks like. That does not excuse anything. It does not shift responsibility. But it tells us, with precision, where the work has to happen — and why the rare punishment of individuals after the fact, without changing the culture that produced them, will never be enough.
Predator Culture is not a collection of bad actors. It is a system. It recruits from scarcity — scarcity of emotional vocabulary, of positively-modeled relationships, of spaces where boys are taught they are more than their appetites and given the support and safety to be vulnerable, whole human beings. Until we address the soil, we will keep pulling up the same weeds.
The Only Education That Changes the Ground
Empowerment Self-Defense — ESD — is the framework that comes closest to addressing this at the root. And I want to be precise about what ESD actually is, because it is frequently misunderstood as a women’s self-defense class.
“Empowerment Self-Defense is a holistic, trauma-informed approach that goes beyond physical techniques to include psychological, verbal, and strategic skills — helping individuals recognize, avoid, and resist threats. At its core, ESD empowers individuals within their social and cultural contexts to prevent, resist, and recover from violence.”
— International Association of ESD Professionals, ESDprofessionals.org
ESD teaches people to recognize threatening behavior before it escalates. It expands awareness, builds the language for boundary-setting, trains de-escalation, and — critically — it does this across global borders, genders, cultures, ages, and abilities. ESD serves women, men, teens, LGBTQIA2S+ communities, trauma survivors, and people with disabilities, because its core insight is that everyone has the right to live in a world free from violence, and therefore everyone has a role in dismantling the culture that sustains it – from child a**** to war, from the intimate to the global.
This is preventive education: building the inner architecture that makes Predator Culture less legible, less appealing.
A person who has been taught to recognize coercion, who has language for consent and violation, who understands that other people are not objects to be used — that person does not become a visitor to “#eyecheck” content. And if they encounter it, they know what to name it.
So. Someone You Know Was Probably There.
62 million visits. One month. The core audience in the United States. An 85–94% probability that someone in your personal circle of 10 men was among them.
“The shame must change sides” — as Gisèle Pelicot said, sitting in a courtroom while recordings of her own rape were played for the world, because she understood that silence is the mechanism these communities depend on to survive.
We are not going to fix this by softening the language. We are not going to fix it by letting platforms silence the people naming the problem while the problem itself adapts and grows. We are not going to fix it by treating men as irredeemable villains and cutting them out of the solution.
We are going to fix it by teaching people, from the beginning, what dignity looks like. What connection feels like. What it means to recognize a threat, name a violation, and refuse to be part of a culture that profits from unconscious women. That is ESD. That is the work.
#PredatorCulture #ESDEducation #SupportCulture #EmpowermentSelfDefense #SexualViolencePrevention #MenAndBoys #GenderEquity
ORIGINAL STORY CREDITS
Journalists: Isabell Beer, Isabel Ströh
Reporters: Saskya Vandoorne, Niamh Kennedy, and Kara Fox
Contributors/Investigation Team: Carlotta Dotto, Gabriele Magro, Lisa Courbebaisse, Elina Baudier Kim, and Antonia Mortensen
Writer: Kara Fox
Editor: Laura Smith-Spark
Outlet: CNN
SOURCES
1 CNN As Equals Investigation: “Exposing a global ‘online rape academy’ that is teaching men how to abuse women and evade detection,” March 26, 2026. cnn.com
2 Snopes Fact-Check: “CNN reported on ‘online rape academy,’ but ‘62M men’ figure misrepresents findings,” April 2026. snopes.com
3 U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Backpage.com’s Knowing Facilitation of Online Sex Trafficking, January 2017.
4 The Intercept: “QAnon Was Born Out of the Sex Ad Moral Panic That Took Down Backpage.com,” April 2024.
5 FBI: “Compensation for Backpage, CityXGuide Sex Trafficking Survivors,” December 2025. fbi.gov
6 International Association of ESD Professionals: “What is Empowerment Self-Defense?” esdprofessionals.org
7 U.S. Census Bureau / StatisticsTimes: U.S. adult male population ~131 million (2026 estimate).
8 Semrush traffic data: Motherless.com core audience confirmed as US-based (March 2026). semrush.com
Probability calculation: P(at least one in group of 10) = 1 − (1 − p)¹10, where p = 0.25 (conservative: US-majority share of 62M visits ÷ 131M adult men). Result: ~94%. At p = 0.17: ~84%.