Some thirty years ago, in the face of strong opposition, including from the National Organization for Women (NOW), Congress amended the Federal Rules of Evidence to add Rules 413–15. A significant number of states have followed. Contrary to the “cardinal” rule of precluding admission of prior bad acts evidence to prove a person’s propensity to commit such an act, Rules 413 to 415 explicitly permit admission of evidence of prior sexual assault (413 and 415) and child molestation (414 and 415) for the propensity inference.

Chapter 5 examines three cases involving victims of rape: Adama Vandi v. Sierra Leone, Ekundayo Idris v. The Federal Republic of Nigeria, and Satta Lamin Banya v. Republic of Sierra Leone. In two of these judgments, there was a partial award of the applicants’ claims for violations against the defendant states, as well as the remedies sought, while in the third case, all claims were granted. In the cases of Vandi and E.I., the Court declined to declare the respective defendant states liable for GBV as a form of gender-based discrimination, which was the specific relief sought by the applicants. However, it did issue such a declaration in Banya. The Court’s reasoning for this decline echoes its reasoning in Njemanze, discussed in Chapter 2. Nonetheless, the Court’s finding of gender-based discrimination in Banya was not supported by its earlier jurisprudence set out in Njemanze. Essentially, the ECOWAS Court is reluctant to declare a violation of gender-based discrimination by a state on the basis of individual victims unless the violation is demonstrated to be systemic. This chapter explains how this reasoning is rooted in the Court’s first Maputo Protocol decision – Njemanze – which drew on the ideology of the Velasquez case that established the due diligence principle. It argues that a broader and proper application of the due diligence principle could expand the Court’s limited perspective on state responsibility for human rights violations. The discussion contrasts the proposed wider application of the principle with the implications it may have on the Court’s functioning, given its liberal access rules, highlighting the need for a balanced approach.

This chapter proposes to show that reading Martin Amis’s representation of women in his London Trilogy today raises a number of issues related to the elusive nature of the author’s voice and values in the text. In Money and London Fields in particular, the violence women are submitted to by the male narrators and characters, even though partaking of the satire Amis brushes upon British society in the 1980s, tends to systematically portray women as victims. However, it must not be forgotten that Amis also introduces a number of female figures of relative empowerment in his novels, whose various forms of agency (murderees, authors, femmes fatales) are worth pointing out. The question as to the reality of this agency has to be raised, however, in the context of the general economy of the simulacrum which Amis’s novels denounce and promote. If Amis’s carnivalesque satires leave nothing unscathed and celebrate the death of all great narratives, how can the feminist narrative be applied to them? It seems that Amis’s own beliefs in the powers and of language and language games provide a key to beginning to answer this question.

Using a dataset of over 400,000 cases, this chapter empirically tests for multi-stage discrimination. It reveals that female complainants and cases involving violence against women systematically face longer delays, and unfavorable outcomes at every stage of the justice process.

This chapter illustrates the ways that shared images of the goddess Peithō on Greek vase paintings may have functioned as a resource for processing ambivalence toward her power over male–female sexual relations in and outside marriage. Evidence from cult worship and textual references including Aeschylus’ Suppliants, works of Plutarch, and Nonnus’ Dionysiaca, showcase complex perceptions of Peithō’s influence and role as a marriage goddess in association with both Artemis and Aphrodite. The bulk of the chapter examines several vase paintings representing Peithō participating in seemingly paradoxical roles throughout the Athenian wedding ritual. Romanticized depictions of Peithō beautifying the bride in one scene and supporting an abduction in another underscore the acute ambivalence surrounding her vested interest in seduction and sex. Collective giving, receiving, and consideration of these images, however, allowed viewers to acknowledge and, through humor, to tolerate Peithō’s socially necessary yet at times unscrupulous influence over male–female sexual relations.

This chapter examines the broad legal framework governing sexual offences by examining the selected offences of rape and sexual assault, which provide a foundation for understanding other sexual offences. This chapter will also briefly discuss sexual offences against vulnerable individuals such as children. Finally, the chapter considers the challenge that technology increasingly poses in the area of sexual offences and considers how technology may facilitate traditional forms of offending or create new forms of offending.

Millions of women and girls worldwide experience violence. Violence against women and girls takes many forms, including physical, emotional and sexual violence and abuse, which is associated with a range of adverse impacts on women, their families and society as a whole. Health professionals supporting women during the perinatal period should assess the risks posed by exposure to previous or current violence and how this may affect them during pregnancy. As an important risk factor in a woman’s mental health presentation, psychiatrists working with pregnant and postpartum women should consider the presence of violence in their formulation; it can increase the risk of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Domestic violence and abuse increase the risk of domestic homicide and may play a role in many perinatal suicides. Sensitive assessment and effective management of women exposed to violence can improve engagement with mental health services and response to treatment.

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.