Vkontakte cracks down on a nasty ‘slut-shaming’ World Cup trend

Vkontakte has issued warnings to the administrators of groups created to shame Russian women for consorting with foreign soccer fans come to watch the FIFA World Cup. Representatives of the social network told the newspaper Vedomosti that Vkontakte has demanded stricter moderation of the comments and content posted in these communities.

One of these warnings went out to the administrators of the community “Buceta Rosa” — a group created on June 19 after several Brazilian tourists fooled a Russian woman into chanting the Portuguese phrase “buceta rosa” (pink pussy). The group’s members share photos of Russian women interacting with foreigners, and the comments on the images are often insulting and sometimes threatening.

One of the community’s administrators (a 27-year-old man named Anton, who refused to reveal his surname) told Meduza that he doesn’t believe his group violates the rights of the women in the photos shared on “Buceta Rosa.” “Everything was shared either by the girls themselves or their lover-friends,” he said.

In mid-June, Tamara Pletneva, the chairperson of the State Duma’s Family Affairs Committee, warned Russian women against having sex with visiting foreigners during this summer’s FIFA World Cup, saying that they’ll be abandoned and left to raise their children alone. Citing the USSR’s experience from 1980, when Moscow hosted the Summer Olympics, Pletneva told the radio station Govorit Moskva: “These kids suffer for it later, and they’ve suffered since Soviet times.” Just to keep things edgy, she also threw in a racist insight, saying, “It’s alright when it’s within one race, but...” before clarifying that she “isn’t a nationalist.”

Roughly a million soccer fans from foreign countries are expected to visit Russia during this summer’s soccer tournament.