ABSTRACT
Besides fatal offences, rape is one of humanity's most severely penalized acts. In history, people's understanding of sexual violence and its role in criminal law was typically linked to the patriarchal ideology of chastity, where the virgin's maidenhood and the wife's loyalty were valued, but a woman of ill repute could not be raped. The objectifying ideology of chastity was concretely embodied in the logic behind King Kristoffer's Law, where seducing another man's wife was criminalized under the section pertaining to theft. The rigid concepts of women's sexuality that haunted the legal definitions of rape to reveal the difficulty of living according to the chastity ideals of the time. The concept of ideal victim is helpful also as applied to historical situations, where even the persons subjected to sexual violence were unequal compared to each other. Not everyone was considered to deserve the same level of legal protection, even in principle.
