Rape has been a serious criminal offence in a lot of Europe since the middle ages… But as the crime happens in private where there is considerable shame applied to consentual extra merital liaisons there was a sort of “conflict of interest” for women to claim that it was something forced on them and not consentual circumstances. This, and the level of punishment being high required equally high burden of proof so usually unless someone was actually physically beaten to the point where it would be ludicrous to assume it consentual during the attack or there were independent witnessess to the crime you see this long history of rape being on the books as illegal but very little motivation to convict.
A lot of these rapes could be in step with the practice of “stealthing” or reproductive coercion where a condom or other contraceptive is willingly tampered with or removed during sex without the knowledge of the partner. This, while not the violent crime we automatically think of associating with rape is a removal of consent that has severe potential mental and physical reprocussions. Rape also encapsulates aspects where consent was removed partway during an otherwise consentual act but one of the partners refuses to stop. These styles of rape are quite common in the culture of dating which has culturally evolved to include sexual liasons as part of the trial period of determining good long term matches.
With our modern concepts of consent the perceived range of acts which count as reportable rape is larger than ever before due to decent education campaigns but the conviction rate remains low because of the same issues of burden of proof not being supportable to meet the level of persecution.
I cannot fathom that much raping in one state in that period of time. How does that get ignored? The crime is considered to be as serious as murder.
Rape has been a serious criminal offence in a lot of Europe since the middle ages… But as the crime happens in private where there is considerable shame applied to consentual extra merital liaisons there was a sort of “conflict of interest” for women to claim that it was something forced on them and not consentual circumstances. This, and the level of punishment being high required equally high burden of proof so usually unless someone was actually physically beaten to the point where it would be ludicrous to assume it consentual during the attack or there were independent witnessess to the crime you see this long history of rape being on the books as illegal but very little motivation to convict.
A lot of these rapes could be in step with the practice of “stealthing” or reproductive coercion where a condom or other contraceptive is willingly tampered with or removed during sex without the knowledge of the partner. This, while not the violent crime we automatically think of associating with rape is a removal of consent that has severe potential mental and physical reprocussions. Rape also encapsulates aspects where consent was removed partway during an otherwise consentual act but one of the partners refuses to stop. These styles of rape are quite common in the culture of dating which has culturally evolved to include sexual liasons as part of the trial period of determining good long term matches.
With our modern concepts of consent the perceived range of acts which count as reportable rape is larger than ever before due to decent education campaigns but the conviction rate remains low because of the same issues of burden of proof not being supportable to meet the level of persecution.