This chapter charts sexual violence over time and place, showing substantial shifts in thinking about sex as violence, rape as an assault on property, emerging ideas of consent, and changing attitudes towards the victim and the offender. 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. It highlights the fact that responses to sexual violence vary between individuals and communities, though survivors reveal that many forms of sex might be experienced as violent or traumatic, regardless of whether the acts were normalised or criminalised. Ideas of sexual violence are read through intersectional lenses, highlighting the idea that normative ideas of gender, sexual identity, race and class heightened the potential for sexual exploitation of marginalised groups. Limited, fragmented or unrepresentative sources make it challenging to trace sexual violence in history, but it is imperative to do so, as sexual crimes have had a substantial impact on the life experiences of individuals and their families and communities.

Though attitudes towards sexual violence shift and change over time and place, across the past two hundred years child sexual abuse has predominantly been viewed as a heinous crime. Nonetheless, there were many variations on what constituted sexual assault, and how this was understood in the community. An act that might be a heinous crime in one time period or one region may be legally and socially acceptable in another. This chapter will chart a range of attitudes and responses towards child sexual abuse. It argues that children have long been seen as vulnerable to sexual assault, which was understood as morally problematic and often a criminal offence. Yet despite significant social and legal change, state and community practices have failed to solve the problem of vulnerable children, and sexual assault of minors continues to be an issue across the globe.