ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book illustrates some of the difficulties in measuring rape in population surveys. It addresses legal responses to rape in the Nordic countries, which is an important strand of Nordic scholarship on rape: something that perhaps reflects that legal strategies have long been the priority of both Nordic governments and of women’s movements. The book explores a legal reform two decades in the making and looks at the interaction between the law-revision process, public debates and the role of the sanctity of family and home in Finnish culture. It analyses the trajectory of Swedish debates on rape law in the period 1990–2015. This was a period in which rape law underwent major revisions designed to solve problems in prosecuting rape in expressing understandings of the harm of rape. The book investigates situational descriptions of sexual transgressions from the perspective of the transgressor.
