Category:Rape Tropes

"By its very nature, rape displays a "total contempt for the personal integrity and autonomy" of the victim; 'short of homicide, [it is] the "ultimate violation of self.'" Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584, 597, 603 (1977). Along with other forms of sexual assault, it belongs to that class of indignities against the person that cannot ever be fully righted, and that diminishes all humanity." —Mary M. v. City of Los Angeles, 54 Cal.3d 202,222 (1991)

Rape is one of the more difficult subjects to handle in a work of fiction, not least because (unlike, say, murder) there is a chance that one of the work's readers has experienced this crime first-hand. For the most part, the tropes that have been collected here describe less sensitive and sometimes downright backwards depictions of rape.

For obvious reasons, many of these tropes are also subtropes of Moral Event Horizon.