Gender inequality in India arises from widespread societal attitudes that prioritize the economic and social status of men and, as a result, favour investment in male children. Policy actions have resulted in significant improvements in women’s educational attainment and political representation, but there has been only limited progress in women’s labour force participation, in rates of domestic violence and rape, and in the abatement of trends in the selective abortion of girls. Attitudes pertaining to the status of women also show limited improvement.

This chapter moves from the semi-privacy of homes to the more public arena of urban courts. It looks at the surprising role of the pox in two different kinds of legal cases involving unlawful sex: suits for separation and rape cases. In both types of case, the disease served as a proxy for sex, material evidence of otherwise unprovable acts. Yet its role in court was much more complex than this. Marks of the disease were visible and long-enduring, an early form of medical forensics, and women could talk about the disease more freely than they could talk about sexual matters. Mothers of rape victims could bear witness to the horrifying effects of disease and disgruntled wives could frame their husbands’ abuse as contagion stemming from illicit sex. The disease allowed women to speak the unspeakable. What is more, cases did not rest wholly on women’s words, which were accorded little value in courts. Confirming the existence and transmission of disease called for the allegedly more trustworthy testimony of medical men. The disease centered legal cases about sex on to the words and bodily inspections that the court deemed reliable.

The chapter argues that the Red Army’s troops prized sexual activity as one of the defining characteristics of strong manhood. They tended to consider all women – Soviet civilians, their female comrades, and European women – as potential sexual partners. Although many Soviet soldiers and officers viewed all women in this way, how much violence they were willing to employ to obtain sex, and what they could get away with, varied considerably between different groups of women. The most vulnerable to attacks were women from “enemy” countries, which explains the mass nature of sexual violence in Romania, Hungary, and Austria. The chapter also discusses the soldiers’ absurd and untrue stories of foreign women as depraved seductresses, which had the goal of justifying the violence. It also discusses sexual relations between Soviet soldiers and European civilians that were transactional and free of outright violence.

It was not implausibe for Spanish inquisitors and their wider staff to provoke scandal in their communities through moral, sexual, physical, and financial offenses. The same held true for Spanish Catholic clergy at large. This essay examines the varieties and possible sites of inquisitorial malfeasance, as well as the special legal privileges that constituted one of the main attractions of being employed in an inquisition tribunal. The essay also ponders in particular the crime and heresy of clerical solicitation of female penitents for sexual favors. Those clerical malefactors were sentenced in secret and punished via exile that took them out of their communities. They thus kept their identities and offenses a secret. At the same time, however the Spanish Inquisition offered a legal platform for female complainants to voice their grievances.

Chapter 5 moves to Veracruz and the inaugural moments of General Winfield Scott’s 1847 Mexico City campaign. It uses neglected court-martial records to show how the army’s newly formed rescuer-identity shaped General Winfield Scott’s new military commissions. The commissions radically expanded the scope of military justice to encompass not only soldiers but all persons in occupied territory, and this instrument of martial power endures today. Yet, the first capital case tried by military commission – in which the army hanged Isaac Kirk, a Black man from Tennessee, for allegedly raping Maria Antonia Gallegas, a Mexican woman – has remained until now completely unstudied. A close reading of the case file, including the previously uncited testimonies of Gallegas and several enlisted men, lays bare the race and gender dynamics at the heart of army culture and produces new insights into how Scott managed to put his military commission system into effect without foundation in law.

This chapter surveys three broad categories of sexual violence—a term I use to designate rape, threatened assault, and kidnapping—portrayed in travel writing produced in Eurasia between the fifth and fifteenth centuries. These three categories of violence are differentiated by their perpetrators: foreign strangers; men upon whom women depend to facilitate their travel, particularly at sea; and trusted travel companions. The first scenario promulgates the popular myth that ‘real rape’ entails violence from a stranger and occurs only when women venture outside the household’s safe confines. Authors often use this scenario in overtly racist or xenophobic ways. The second situation centres on predation by male workers who provide necessary transportation or hospitality to traveling women, while the third sheds light on the intimate treachery of male travel partners. All three categories of violation hinge on the issue of trust in different ways. But medieval travel texts do more than share cautionary tales about the dangers of women’s travel in a patriarchal world. They also feature affirming and emancipatory strategies of resisting rape deployed by women traveling far from home.

One distinctive feature of the Peloponnesian War is the intimacy of its violence. The war is characterised by the sacking of cities, civil war and the impoverished existence of vulnerable communities living their lives as refugees in exile. In every other recorded conflict, this is a recipe that leads to high rates of sexual violence against women and children. Yet our historical sources are almost entirely silent about the occurrence of such abuse. This chapter explores the implications of the premise that there was a significant rate of unrecorded sexual violence during the Peloponnesian War. It details all the various circumstances in which such abuse was likely to occur and draws upon comparative material from other conflicts to show the strong likelihood of sexual violence. It also explores ways in which the topic of sexual abuse was addressed indirectly in art and drama through the metaphor of the sacking of Troy and the sexual violation of women in myth. The messages of these cultural products gain greater resonance and vitality when placed against a backdrop in which sexual violation is a regular occurrence as part of the nature of war.

German men and their collaborators perpetrated sexual violence during the Holocaust and throughout the war, during pogroms, in ghettos and labor-camps, as well as in concentration and extermination camps. They committed this violence against women, girls, and gender-nonconforming people as well as against minorities, such as Roma. Sexual coercion and abuse also occurred within the societies of those persecuted, for example in ghettos, camps, or partisan groups. In hiding or during liberation, people also experienced sexual violence at the hands of protectors, allies, or liberation soldiers. This chapter focuses on the experiences of women, but importantly also addresses those of male victims. It also addresses how sexual violence was part of Nazis’ and their collaborators’ acts of genocidal violence against Jews.

Whereas other chapters in this volume integrate gender perspectives, this chapter argues that gender is a key lens for understanding Jewish experiences in the Holocaust. Across Europe, in Jewish communities vastly different in terms of size and religious mores, gender roles and gender ideals affected access to information, escape trajectories, and survival strategies.

This chapter offers an intersectional feminist reading of West Side Story that shows how women of color and the gender non-conforming character Anybodys are central to the (partial) redemptive arc of the musical. The narrative and characterizations—as expressed through songs, dances, and score—suggest a path to a better “Somewhere” that requires us to step outside the confines of normative masculinity and femininity which reinforce the boundaries of race and class. Throughout the musical, Anita and Maria must navigate the tensions within the concepts of assimilation and multiculturalism, as well as a social landscape dominated by an anxious and often violent masculinity. Careful attention to performances of these roles, and the character Anybodys, make clear that the belonging they (and we the audience) seek might be found somewhere beyond the reductive and destructive strictures of the gender binary.

This chapter explores the diversity of experiences lived by women during the Vietnam War where they participated as politicians, soldiers, diplomats, covert agents, employees, and active civilian voices. The chapter focuses on the years 1954 to 1975 to illustrate the changing expectations and opportunities for women from the fall of the French colonial government through escalation. The chapter introduces the experiences of women across both the North and South to illustrate similarities and differences that occurred as a result of the large-scale American presence in South Vietnamese urban spaces. In particular, the study explores the lines between civilian and combatant. Through their active participation, women shaped foreign relations through their politics, labor, and interactions with leaders and servicemembers. The military and interpersonal violence of the conflict also had unique and lasting impacts on women. Overall, the chapter seeks to examine women’s roles within the context of the war to understand their influence on the conflict.

This chapter charts the processes by which deceptive sex came to be regarded as potentially constituting rape. Through tracing these developments, the chapter shows how doctrinal features of the law, such as the way consent and deception are thought to be related and the modes of deception punished by law, were important to this process. Yet the chapter also argues that to fully appreciate how and why the changes occurred, it is necessary to pay attention to the array of interests the law has sought to protect and how these have shaped the range of topics of deception that might ground a charge of rape. This argument leads to the conclusion that, in the context of deceptive sex, deception has not been considered wrongful because it invalidates or precludes consent, as is commonly thought; rather, deception has invalidated or precluded consent because it has sometimes been considered wrongful. The chapter ends by introducing some reasons why this insight is important to ongoing debates regarding the criminalisation of deceptive sex.

This chapter explores the civil wrong of seduction to establish its nature and parameters and draw out its associations with deception. It argues that, as the earliest legal response to deceptive sex, seduction is in some senses the civil law analogue of later criminal laws. The chapter then shows how the action of seduction was rooted in the idea that deception was wrongful because it was one way of leading a woman off the ‘right’ path and that the harms it caused reflected the gendered significance of marriage and other ‘moral’ forms of intimacy. Furthermore, it highlights how these features of the action provided a framework within which the range of qualifying deceptions was limited and the temporal dimensions of the wrong were set. Finally, the chapter offers some reflections on how the distinctions between private and public introduced in Chapter 1 bore on the decision to keep seduction a civil wrong before foregrounding how these observations, and those made throughout the rest of the chapter, are pertinent to contemporary discussions about criminalising deceptive sex.

This chapter analyses crimes involving procuring sex, including procuring sex by deception. It argues that to appreciate the nature of these offences, and their place within this book, it is necessary both to understand how the verb ‘to procure’ was interpreted, including when and why it required deception, and to pay attention to the acts whose procurement was proscribed by law. The chapter provides elucidation on both fronts, showing how the procuring offences were geared towards prohibiting ‘illicit’ (i.e., immoral) sexual activities and therefore criminalised the use of deception to lure others into committing such acts. In demonstrating this point, the chapter argues that a culturally sensitive vision of what makes intimacy valuable shaped and constrained the use of the procuring offences. Finally, the chapter argues that the demise of the procuring offences set the stage for the expansion of the crime of rape by deception and that examining how the procuring offences worked yields important lessons for those attempting to engage critically with this development.

Around 30% of women worldwide have been subjected to either physical or sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetimes. In Europe, one in 20 women over the age of 15 has been raped. Meanwhile gross misogyny and sexual violence against women is becoming more normalised in society. When women have been victims of physical, sexual violence, emotional abuse or coercive control the impact on their mental health can be severe.The sense of shame can be overwhelming. Mental health problems are not an inevitable consequence of IPV but anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis, self-harm, substance misuse and getting a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) are all more common. Domestic violence can also result in suicide and is linked to murder-suicide and ‘honour’ killing. However, women who have killed abusive men have been repeatedly denied justice. Mental health services need training about IPV and sexual violence and to make strong links with organisations in the community. Each of us needs to ensure that we would know what we would do to help a friend, family member or colleague who is experiencing domestic violence or sexual assault.