Raptio

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Raptio (in

literary English rendered as rape) is a Latin term for, among several other meanings for senses of "taking", the large-scale abduction of women: kidnapping for marriage, concubinage or sexual slavery
. The equivalent German term is Frauenraub (literally woman robbery).

Bride kidnapping is distinguished from raptio in that the former is the abduction of one woman by one man (and his friends and relatives), whereas the latter is the abduction of many women by groups of men, possibly in a time of war.

Terminology

The English word rape retains the Latin meaning in

Rape of Nanking. The Oxford English Dictionary
gives the definition "the act of carrying away a person, especially a woman, by force" besides the more general "the act of taking anything by force" (marked as obsolete) and the more specific "violation or ravishing of a woman".

English rape was in use since the 14th century in the general sense of "seize prey, take by force", from raper, an Old French legal term for "to seize", in turn from Latin rapere "seize, carry off by force, abduct". The Latin term was also used for sexual violation, but not always. It is contested that the legendary event known as "The Rape of the Sabine Women", while ultimately motivated sexually, did not entail sexual violation of the Sabine women on the spot, who were instead abducted, and then implored by the Romans to marry them (as opposed to striking a deal with their fathers or brothers first, as would have been required by law).

Though the sexual connotation is today dominant, the word "rape" can be used in a non-sexual context in literary English. In Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, the title means "the theft of a lock [of hair]", exaggerating a trivial violation against a person. In the twentieth century, the classically trained J. R. R. Tolkien used the word with its old meaning of "seizing and taking away" in his The Silmarillion. The musical comedy The Fantasticks has a controversial song ("It Depends on What You Pay") about "an old-fashioned rape". Compare also the adjective "rapacious" which retains the generic meaning of greedy and grasping.

In

Roman Catholic canon law, raptio refers to the legal prohibition of matrimony if the bride was abducted forcibly (Canon 1089 CIC).[citation needed
]

History

The practice is surmised to have been common since anthropological antiquity. An excavation of the Neolithic Linear Pottery culture site at Asparn-Schletz, Austria, revealed the remains of numerous slain victims. Among them, young women and children were clearly under-represented, suggesting that attackers had killed the men but abducted the nubile women.[1] Investigation of the Neolithic skeletons found in the Talheim Death Pit suggests that prehistoric men from neighboring tribes were prepared to fight and kill each other to capture and secure women.[2]

Abduction of women is a common practice in

historical human migrations, the tendency of mobile groups of invading males to abduct indigenous females is reflected in the greater stability of Human mitochondrial DNA haplogroups compared to Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups
.

Louvre Museum
)

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
.

Mapuches kidnapping a woman during a malón raid as shown in La vuelta del malón (The return of the raiders) by Ángel Della Valle (1892).

In

Kautilya. It is one of the eight forms of marriage and it is condemned by scriptures.[citation needed
]

In the 3rd century, Gothic Christianity appears to have been initiated under the influence of Christian women captured by the Goths in Moesia and Thrace: in 251 AD, the Gothic army raided the Roman provinces of Moesia and Thrace, defeated and killed the Roman emperor Decius, and took a number of (predominantly female) captives, many of whom were Christian. This is assumed to represent the first lasting contact of the Goths with Christianity.[5]

In the

Sura 4
:25). Mutual abduction of women between Christian and Muslim communities was common in the
Balkans under Ottoman rule, and is a frequent theme in the Hajduk songs of the period.[6]

indigenous tribe living in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil.[9] When Yanomami tribes fought and raided nearby tribes, women were often raped and brought back to the shabono to be adopted into the captor's community.[10]

See also

References

  1. ^ Eisenhauer, U., Kulturwandel und Innovationsprozess: Die fünf grossen 'W' und die Verbreitung des Mittelneolithikums in Südwestdeutschland. Archäologische Informationen 22, 1999, 215–239; an alternative interpretation is the focus of
    abduction of children rather than women, a suggestion also made for the mass grave excavated at Talheim. See E Biermann, Überlegungen zur Bevölkerungsgrösse in Siedlungen der Bandkeramik (2001) "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 November 2013. Retrieved 10 July 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link
    )
  2. .
  3. ^ Livy: The Rape of the Sabines Archived 11 March 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ H. H. Munro (Saki), Beasts and Super-Beasts: Beasts, available at "Schartz-Metterklume Method,a short story by Saki [H H Munro]". Archived from the original on 6 January 2009. Retrieved 29 October 2008.
  5. ^ Simek, Rudolf, Religion und Mythologie der Germanen (2003), p. 229
  6. ^ K. Simiczijev, Pieśń hajducka Słowian południowych ("the Hajduk songs of the South Slavs") 1985; review by Christo Vasilev, Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung, 1988[page needed]
  7. . Valero , a mestizo girl , was captured by Yanomamo in 1932 or 1933
  8. . True story of Helena Valero a mestizo who lived among the Yanoama of the Upper Orinoco for almost 20 years after being kidnapped by them as a young child
  9. ]
  10. ^ R. Brian Ferguson (1995). Yanomami Warfare: A Political History. Santa Fe: School for American Research Press.[page needed]

Further reading

  • Barnes, R. H. (1999). "Marriage by Capture". The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 5 (1): 57–73. .
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