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This essay reviews historical studies on sexual assault. Ancient concepts of rape involved the theft of women’s chastity, which was the property of their male relatives. Early modern authorities equated rape with adultery and punished victims for sexual immorality.
For much of the early history, sexual harassment and abuse–namely rape– was considered to be a defilement of a man’s property (the father or the husband), rather than a crime against women. There was a disregard for the victim’s feelings and trauma, and most of the punishments given reflect that.
While it is a common rape myth that survivors frequently lie about their experiences, this specific phenomenon is an example of intentional racialized violence. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented 34 mass lynchings that occurred during Reconstruction, each killing between 6 and 200 Black people.
13 lip 2012 · Sexual abuse of children is far from new. Historians of the family have discovered that adults in elite households in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe sometimes treated young children as sexual playthings. A striking example involves the future King of France, Louis XIII.
15 kwi 2018 · Early American colonies defined rape at the common-law as “carnal knowledge of a woman 10 year or older, forcibly and against her will.”. In the late 1800s, temperance and suffrage activists successfully advocated to raise the legal age of consent from 10 to between 14 and 18, depending on the state.
26 kwi 2024 · It traces how sexual violence was defined and understood, in both society and law, from the classical world to today, examining case studies that include rape, sodomy and offences against children. It examines the structural impediments to the prevention of sexual violence, and the social and legal barriers to justice when a crime did occur.
3 paź 2013 · By the late 1800s and early 1900s, a growing number of people lived in cities instead of farms or small villages and many white men used the new anonymity a city afforded them to harass women without facing consequences.
