ABSTRACT
The origin of the word is in the Latin rapere. As an English noun, the word ‘rape’ originates in the early fourteenth century, when it meant ‘booty, prey’. By the mid-fourteenth century, it referred to ‘forceful seizure; plundering, robbery, extortion’. ‘Rape is endemic to our culture because there’s no widely accepted cultural definition of what it actually is', write Walter Moseley and Rae Gomes in an article subtitled ‘Rape culture exists because people don’t believe it does'. The story of the rape of Orithyia by the Greek god of the northern wind Boreas is perhaps less well known than some of the other mythological rapes. Blurring the question of the woman's consent is another way in which the displacement of the violence occurs. The rape is therefore legal because it has been commanded by the Roman leader; it is not a crime against individual women, since unmarried women, in Roman law, were under the sway of the paterfamilias.
