To return hopefully for the last time.....

Teach your kids well - and also, in the knowledge and understanding of the past

Throughout history (rape is by no means a recent phenomena) definitions of rape were a function of cultural attitudes toward violence and its victims, who were mostly society's weakest members--poor women and children.

During the 'early modern period', women and children were viewed as the property of males, instead of as autonomous individuals.
Rape was therefore a form of theft in which the victim was always suspected of complicity and morally tainted by involvement, no matter how unwitting, in the act

Convictions against rapists were nearly impossible to win in court because definitions of the crime were narrow, the most blatant evidence tended to be ignored, and judges assumed that even the youngest victims were somehow accomplices in the crime.

As Western society became less tolerant of violence against the person, especially toward children, and more conscious of rape's psychological damage to the individual, it began to "see" sexual violence in cases where previously it had discerned only a misdemeanor towards which justice, in spite of the harsh penalties the law prescribed for rape, was accustomed to turning a blind eye.

The growth of the popular press in the eighteenth century fostered a public opinion less tolerant of violence. The development of medical interest in the anatomical traces of rape, and, in the later nineteenth century, of interest also in the psychological scars, focused attention on the victim as an individual.

Child rape began to be more vigorously condemned, especially its violence and physical wounds.

In more recent times, laws were easier to alter than the attitudes and behaviour of those who administered them

Nevertheless, society began to view the rapist as a criminal instead of as an ordinary person temporarily blinded by lust.

However, it was not until the 1970s that women forced the courts to take rape against adult women seriously, and to combat defence strategies that "blamed the victim" for the attack

It seems, from the origin of this thread and some contibutions, this battle against archaic cultural suspicions regarding the veracity and moral probity of rape victims has not yet been won but…..


Teach your children better!