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xviii Introduction in his beliefs. The belief goes back centuries. A widely used 17th-century judi- cial manual, Michael Dalton’s The Country Justice, stated that “if a Woman at the time of the supposed Rape, do conceive with Child by the Ravisher, this is no Rape for a Woman cannot conceive with Child except she doth consent” (Dalton 1690, 392). One has only to look at the numbers of enslaved women who became pregnant after being raped or the pregnancies that resulted from wartime rapes to realize that this belief has no validity. In fact, scientific stud- ies have demonstrated that pregnancy from rape occurs at the same rate as pregnancy from consensual sex. Most reports, including those from RAINN, estimate the figure as about 3.1–5 percent (Clancy 2012). Though rape is an age-old crime, modern technology has created new forms of sexual violence. The Internet and social media have made cyberstalking pos- sible, and they have also permitted victims of sexual assaults to be revictimized through the posting of photos and videos of their attacks. Web sites, often sites on the “dark web” that are accessible only through special software and autho- rization, display pornography, including child pornography and pornography made by those held in sexual slavery. In addition, violence, including sexual violence, is frequently found in television shows, movies, and video games. Sociologist Laura Finley notes that “more than 1,000 studies have confirmed that television contributes in various ways to violent behavior.” For example, it can increase aggression and fear in viewers. Importantly, frequent watching of violent media desensitizes viewers to real-world violence. Finally, consumers of violent media develop an increased appetite for violence (Finley 2016, 27–28). This violent media—in games, television, music videos, and movies—tends to portray hypersexualized characters and may present violent sex as acceptable. Yet in recent decades, reformers, legislators, and the media have brought attention to the problem of rape and sexual violence. Laws such as the Clery Act (first passed in 1990) and the Campus Sexual Assault Victims’ Bill of Rights (1992) have been enacted to combat sexual violence on college campuses. State and federal rape shield laws, which limit how much of the victim’s prior sexual history can be admitted into court testimony, help shield the victim’s identity. Other important laws have been the Violence Against Women Act—passed in 1994 and reauthorized most recently in 2013—and the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015. During the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals following the wars there, the courts enforced the idea that rape is a war crime and a crime against humanity, and in the 1990s the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute expanded the list of sex-based crimes included in the crimes against humanity. In 2016, for the first time, the International Criminal Court at The Hague passed a guilty sentence for the perpetration of rape as an act of war: The court declared Jean-Pierre Bemba, the former vice president of the Dem- ocratic Republic of the Congo and the commander in chief of the Movement