Almost as long as people have been recording history, they have been documenting sexual assault. According to the writings of ancient Greece At Bible to letters from first explorers, sexual violence has long been a brutal part of human history. Some attacks have even changed the course of history. And, like all history, what we know about past sexual assaults is generally what the victors – mostly men – have told.
“Women are erased,” says Sharon Block, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine and author of Colonial Complexions: Race and the Body in Eighteenth-Century America. “The historical rapes that “counted” are the only ones where men were hurt. »
The wars, in particular, have been linked to blatant sexual assault, ranging from mass rapes committed by Soviet soldiers as they advanced into Germany during the war. The Second World War to sexual violence during the genocides in Rwanda in 1995. In fact, the omnipresence of sexual assault in wars makes these crimes a category in their own right.
Knowing that no list can ever be exhaustive, below you will find the sexual assaults that both influenced history and those that, notably, did not.
1. The advent of Alexander the Great
The assassination of King Philip II.
An act of sexual violence may have contributed to the rise in Alexander The Greataccording to the Greek historians Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch. Their accounts were written hundreds of years after the event was supposed to have taken place, but the story goes like this: In 336 BC, Pausanias of Orestis, a member of King Philip II’s bodyguard of Macedonia (and perhaps his lover), was invited to a banquet by Philip’s father-in-law, Attalus. There he was raped by Attalus’ servants. When Philip refused to punish the attackers (he gave Pausanias a promotion), Pausanias assassinated the king, paving the way for the ascension of Philip’s son, Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great decimates the Persian forces
2. Rape of the Sabine Women
The Rape of the Sabine Women.
The Roman historian Livy, writing in the first century, traces The origins of Rome until the mid-8th century BC, when the warrior tribe faced a shortage of women.
“Population growth was the hardest thing to achieve in ancient times,” says Thomas Martin, author of Ancient Rome: from Romulus to Justinian. According to Livy, the Roman ruler, Romulus, held a religious feast and invited the neighboring Sabine tribe (“Free food and drink,” notes Martin.) At Romulus’ signal, the Romans attacked and killed the Sabine men at the feast and carried off the women. In the resulting bloody war, Sabine women put an end to hostilities, making allies of the tribes and allowing the Romans to multiply.
As with the rape of Lucretia, then Virginia, both told by Livy, there is disagreement among historians as to the veracity of this story. “It’s a myth,” says Mary Beard, historian and author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.
3. Boudicca’s fight for independence
Boudicca, queen of the British Iceni tribe, who led an uprising against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire.
Celtic tribes were a constant thorn in the Roman Empirefrom the time they invaded the island of Britain in 45 AD. The Iceni, a Celtic tribe from East Anglia, were led by a king named Prasutagus, who was married to Boudicca. When Prasutagus died, Rome reclaimed her kingdom, over the objections of Boudicca, who was publicly whipped and forced to watch her daughters being raped by Roman soldiers. Boudicca then gathered a powerful army and rebelled against the Romans, eventually sacking London (then called Londinium).
Roman historian Cassius Dio describe how Boudicca’s own soldiers then violently assaulted Roman women there: “Their breasts were cut off and stuffed into their mouths, so that they appeared to be eating them, then their bodies were skewered lengthwise on sharp stakes . Boudicca’s rebellion was finally crushed by the Roman general Gaius Suetonius in AD 60 or 61.
4. Columbus and slavery
Christopher Columbus receives a young Native American girl as a gift.
When the Italian explorer, Christopher Colombus traveling in the Caribbean in the 1490s, he discovered not only new lands, but at least one of his men document his own rape and torture of an indigenous woman. Michele de Cuneo, a noble friend of Columbus, recounts that a “Caribbean woman” was offered to him by the admiral. When she resisted his attempts at sexual assault, he “took a piece of rope and whipped her violently… Finally, we reached an agreement in such a way that I can tell you that she seemed having been raised in a school for prostitutes. .” Columbus’ ships would eventually return to Europe, wearing more than 1,000 slaves.
5. The rapid acquittal of a baron
Sarah Woodcock, raped by Baron Frederick Calvert.
Baron Frederick Calvert may have been one of the earliest studies of affluence. Leaving a large sum of money – and the exclusive governorship of Maryland – at the age of 20, the English playboy was expelled from Turkey for keeping a harem and allegedly murdered his first wife. In 1768 he was accused of the kidnapping and rape of Sarah Woodcock, a milliner. The jury took a whole hour to acquit him (they decided she hadn’t tried hard enough to escape), but he was kicked out of British society and his title died with him in 1771.
6. “Mutiny on the Bounty” and the dark legacy of Pitcairn
A village on Pitcairn Island.
In April 1779, Fletcher Christian and 18 of his loyal sailors seized a ship belonging to Captain William Bligh in an incident made famous in the novel and film, Mutiny on the Bounty. Christian and his sailors settled on the tiny Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific, as well as Tahiti, where their descendants still live.
In 1999, a 15-year-old girl was accused of rape by an older man on the island. The trial exposed a culture of child sexual abuse that has continued for generations. In 2004, seven men, who made up a third of the island’s male population, were tried for sexual offenses. The trials were complicated by many factors, including the island’s remoteness and lack of a judicial system. Ultimately, six of the seven accused were guilty and three were imprisoned, although none received significant punishment.
7. “Incidents in the life of a slave.” Written by herself.
Harriet Jacobs, circa 1894.
It is impossible to estimate the number of slaves of color assaulted and/or raped by slave owners in the colonies and the United States before the late 1970s. Civil war. What is clear is that such cases were common and would not have been considered “assault”.
As early as 1662, Virginia’s governing body, the House of Burgesses, instituted rules regarding children born to enslaved women, in which the father could be a white (free) man: “If the mother (regardless of her origin racial, whether Indian, black or mixed race) is a slavethe child is a slave, whoever the father is,” says Peter Wallenstein, author of America’s Cradle: A History of Virginia. Surviving accounts of such assaults come only from escaped or formerly enslaved people who managed to record them. Incidents in the life of a slave. Written by herself by Harriet Jacobs is an example. The father of two of her slave children, Samuel Treadwell Sawyer, was elected to Congress.
8. The Kishinev pogrom
The Kishinev massacre.
The murder of 49 Jews in the Russian Empire city of Kishinev in 1903 also included the rape of dozens of Jewish women. In his book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the turning point of historyStephen J. Zipperstein, a professor of history at Stanford, notes that images, as well as stories and poems about Kishinev’s transgressions, have traveled around the world, including America.
The outcry over the Kishinev reports motivated Russian Jews to join revolutionary activity against the Tsarist regime and influenced the migration of thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe to the West and Palestine. At the same time, the pogrom laid the groundwork for the horrors that European Jews would face 40 years later during the civil war. Holocaust.
9. Recy Taylor
Recy Taylor, 90, outside her Florida home in 2010, holding a photo of herself taken in Abbeville, Alabama.
Recy Taylor was 24 when, in 1944, she was kidnapped by six men on her way home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, and gang raped in the back of a truck. Even though one of the perpetrators had confessed, two white juries refused to indict the accused.
Taylor’s rape and the reaction, emblematic of the repression Jim Crow in the south, helped to galvanize the civil rights movement. When details of his story were reported in the black press, the NAACP sent Rosa Parks to Abbeville investigate the question. Parks established the Committee for Equal Justice for Ms. Recy Taylor, whose leaders later organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 2011, the Alabama state legislature officially apologized to Taylor for his lack of prosecution.
