Rape as Backstory

"I suppose it was necessary to have a scene in which the heroine is cruelly treated by men. But (a) couldn't they have thought of something other than rape by a garden hose? and (b) shouldn't such a traumatic event have had some effect on the character?"

— Roger Ebert, review of The Lonely Lady

A popular way to establish a character as having a motivation for their depression, angst, distrust of others, aversion to touch, and/or other anti-social tendencies is to have the revelation that they were raped at some point in their past. The overwhelming majority of characters given this treatment are female, but there are still cases of male characters, although even that is predominantly when they're young and done by other men. While it's perfectly possible to use this trope well, when done poorly the rape is only referenced when the victim wants sympathy — mostly from their sexy new true love. In other factors of their lives, it has little impact. However, in Real Life, the trauma of rape can haunt somebody for the rest of their lives and flashbacks — which can be brought on for as small a reason as being alone in a room with someone — can make trusting future partners incredibly difficult. It's professional therapy, not sex with your true love, that brings relief.

Male-on-female rape is extremely common in bad Fan Fiction. What better justification could your Sympathetic Sue have for her boundless angst than having been raped in her past? If given almost no weight to the story, then it's been handled very badly.

There is Truth in Television to this trope, considering that rape is an extremely traumatic event and can cause serious mental illnesses and psychological repercussions. It's also, sadly, far more common than many people know, with 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men admitting they had experienced attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. The fact that some writers use it to cheap effect for drama is not thought of highly. See also Child by Rape and Promiscuity After Rape.

Super-Trope to Rape Leads to Insanity, which is when this trope also drives the victim into Sanity Slippage.

Contrast Got Over Rape Instantly when the victim has no negative impact from the rape and immediately offers romantic or sexual interest.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• When Kureha from After School Nightmare was walking home from school alone when she was a kindergartner a man grabbed her and raped her in the woods. This and her abusive dad is the reason she Does Not Like Men.
• The manga Asa mo, hiru mo, yoru mo does this with the heroine's backstory, with the main plot being that a guy she has to work with for school looks like her rapist. Incredibly, IT'S PLAYED FOR LAUGHS.
• Attack on Titan reveals that this happened to Ymir Fritz, first person to use Titan powers. While nothing is overtly shown when Eren sees her memories, considering she's a teenage girl and a slave (the man who owns her is King Fritz, ruler of Eldia, who says he'll give her his seed as a reward for using her Titan powers to destroy Eldia's enemies and make the empire flourish), it's easy to put two and two together. Especially since, as a result, Ymir ends up with three daughters by the time she's an adult. This is probably one of the reasons why Eren decides to free her from an eternity trapped in Paths, rather than go along with Zeke's plan of euthanaising all Edlians (which would ultimately undermine what Ymir Fritz went through).
• Baki the Grappler had Joe William, a muscular Gentleman Adventurer who was famous for his wild stunts. It's revealed that the reason for him taking on this lifestyle was that he was raped by the Depraved Bisexual Big Bad Yujiro Hanma, and these adventures were his way of regaining a feeling of control over his life and reasserting his masculinity.
• Banana Fish explains that Ash was raped by the respected soccer coach in his town at the age of 8. Of course, that was only the beginning, as he's then taken as a child prostitute by mafia don Dino Golzine. He's been raped by a lot of middle-aged men, including politicians and military personnel. One of Golzine's guards, Marvin (who is confirmed to be a pedophile), also had his way with Ash when he was about 10-years-old... and filmed it. Some of the other men are also stated to have photos of Ash that they use as wank material, although once Ash gets his hands on them they're promptly burned.
• Though it's only a part of his backstory as a Child Soldier, Guts of Berserk had to deal with rape as a kid at the hands of one of the soldiers of his adoptive father's band, which among other things informs his reluctance to be touched by others. Casca was rescued from an Attempted Rape by Griffith, who gave her a sword she used to kill her would-be rapist. Which makes her actual rape at Griffith's hands (with Guts Forced to Watch) all the more painful.
• In Black Butler, Kid Hero Ciel's Troubling Unchildlike Behavior stems from this, as a cult murdered his parents and brother and raped him in order to use him as a Human Sacrifice for a Deal with the Devil. The devil in question however, had something else in mind.
• Durarara!! Takashi Nasujima had relations with his highschool student Haruna to extort money off of her and later harassed Anri, another student of his.
• Bitter Virgin's main plot revolves around this, as Hinako was raped repeatedly by her stepfather. Her mother kicked him out (by chasing him out with a kitchen knife) after Hinako got pregnant for the second time.
• Black Butler:
  • Jim Macken aka Alois Trancy, from the anime's second season. It's confirmed in episode 8 that he was one of several young boys picked up as Sex Slaves to the elderly Earl. In addition, he had to pose as the Earl's son too, which adds an uncomfortable Parental Incest aspect to the whole thing even though they were not related.
  • The manga shows (and the anime implies) Ciel Phantomhive suffered gang-rape at the hands of the cult who held him captive for a month.
• The Black Lagoon OVA shows that Revy was raped by a policeman as a teenager (among other really crappy stuff that her early years entailed), leading to some serious issues in her current life as a nihilistic gunslinger and muscle for the Lagoon Company.
• Osamu from Bokura no Hentai has Repressed Memories of being raped when he was younger by an older male friend. He thought his vague dreams were memories of a past life where he was a nymphomaniac woman.
• Chizuru "Chizu" Honda from Bokurano, particularly in the manga. She fell for her teacher who lured her and then had his friends gang-rape her. She ended up pregnant as a result. In the anime this is watered down into a consensual Teacher/Student Romance, though her teacher was just using her, however, her age (she's thirteen tops) makes it still count.
• Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!:
  • Goujima Sara's stepfather had a liking for underage girls and started raping her when she was ten. She paid him back by seducing the toughest delinquent in town in exchange for his gang beating the crap out of her dad, then slept her way through her high school before moving to Tokyo to become a porn star.
  • Subverted with Sarashina Utako. She surprised a burglar as a teenager, who jumped on her... and then started sobbing into her chest and then fell asleep. He turned out to be an exploited migrant worker from China and her fragrance reminded him of home, and she convinced him to testify against his boss. This inspired her idea to use her very large bosom to "heal the world".
• A Cruel God Reigns: The series immediately launches into a 6 volume flashback telling the audience about the 6 months of sexual and physical abuse the main character, Jeremy, suffered at the hands of his stepfather.
• Genkaku from Deadman Wonderland was revealed to have been beaten and raped by a group of bullies who hung around the temple. It was definitely a contributing factor for making him Ax-Crazy.
• Played with in Death Parade, in that it was not his own rape but his sister's rape. Shimada has a backstory where his younger sister came home beaten and raped. This caused him to invoke revenge on the man, and this ultimately resulted in his own death.
• Descendants of Darkness has the reveal of Dr. Muraki having impulsively raped thirteen-year-old Hisoka, then cursed him so that he slowly and painfully died over the course of three years as major character development for both of them. Made particularly painful by Hisoka being an empath who can feel other people's emotions especially strongly through physical contact, to the extent that Tsuzuki grabbing him when he's upset causes Hisoka to scream, making it a sort of Mind Rape too.
  • Extra points for 1) the heavy implication later on that Muraki's mother molested him and 2) the possibly-accidental revelation that twelve-year-old Muraki Kazutaka looked frighteningly identical to little Hisoka. So...yeah, he was working out his own backstory issues there, too.
  • After the Queen Camelia arc, in which Hisoka was both competent and effective, (though the trauma of having to kill the girl he liked seems to have messed him up some more, based on how he freezes the next time he has to face his nemesis), he meditates on his fear of becoming Muraki if he isn't careful, of 'losing to the Muraki in him.' There seems to be some tenuous connection to the rape here, at least in many readers' minds. The fact that Muraki started as the Foil to Tsuzuki, but flexibly fills this role for Hisoka in a different way and even Tatsumi in another over the course of the story, never loses and frequently wins, makes him a very depressing villain.
• Don't Meddle with My Daughter!:
  • The "MILF of Steel" epilogue story has villain Heavy Metal recount how he defeated Athena 20 years before the manga's main plotline began. Afterward, he took her to an unmarked island where he and the rest of her enemies took turns with her, before finally gang-raping her. Athena settles the score with him by the end of the story.
  • A short story in the same issue reveals that Hanna^note N.U.D.E's leader was also a rape victim 20 years ago. She has a nightmare about how badly N.U.D.E. was losing against Blowjob's forces during the time Athena had retired. One scene shows Hanna being raped after a failed skirmish, until Athena suddenly appeared and saved her.
• Nakago, the Big Bad from Fushigi Yuugi was taken to the palace of Kutou when he was 11 years old (and then known as Ayuru) because he was one of the long-sought-after Seiryuu warriors. The emperor looks at him, and says, "He's pretty. Like a girl.". Then proceeds to instruct his servants to bathe Ayuru and bring him to the emperor's chambers. The next scene is Ayuru lying on a bed, naked, on the verge of tears.
  • Also Soi, who was a child prostitute subjected to years of sexual abuse until Nakago rescued her.
• Tsubaki Kasugano aka the 6th Diary Holder from Future Diary. Blame the Religion of Evil that kept her imprisoned as their sex toy.
  • In the anime, Ai, one half of the Seventh pair was set up to be raped by her jealous classmates, and Marco, the other half of Seventh never forgave himself for being too late to save her.
• 14-year-old Rena Sendou in Get Backers was raped by both a teacher and her stepfather, although as soon as Himiko defeats her, it loses its seriousness, as Ban runs right up and rips the bodice of her dress to show Himiko her curse scar (and her naked breasts).^note For bonus points, every male character with this same curse scar had it on their back. Only the underage female rape victim had to expose her naked breasts for the audience to see it. After her Heel–Face Turn, she goes straight to Good Is Dumb and Out of Focus, and it's never mentioned again.
• In Goblin Slayer, Sword Maiden's backstory is singularly tragic. Despite being a Gold-Rank Adventurer who has taken on and slain demons in her day and the Archbishop of the Supreme God, she has a crippling fear of goblins as a result of what they did to her back when she was still a rookie, which is what drives her to seek Goblin Slayer's help.
• Subverted in Gunslinger Girl as the conditioning process that turns the girls into cyborgs wipes their memories. Two girls have backstories involving rape, but all memories of the incidents have been heavily repressed by the conditioning:
  • Henrietta was raped and mutilated in a home invasion that killed her family. It turns out she was only repressing the memories, with fatal consequences for her handler Jose and herself after she attacks a man who reminds her of her rapist.
  • Triela's backstory is that she was in a child sex trafficking ring and nearly died due to being in a Snuff Film.
• Hellsing has instances of this that are played completely seriously.
  • Alucard, aka Vlad Tepes Dracul of Wallachia was sexually abused as a child during his time spent as a political hostage for his father under the Ottoman Empire by Turks.
  • Also, in the backstory of Seras, she witnessed a rape and was horribly screwed up by that. More exactly, she saw her mother being killed and raped. Yup, in that order.
• In the manga Honey Bitter, the repeated rape and abuse of Shuri Otokawa by her ex-boyfriend and molestation by other characters caused her to hate men. However, it's only taken seriously in the first chapters, other characters later joking about it and trying to get she and her ex back together as friends and, later, lovers. Her ex is excused by the cast in pity for his angsty backstory.
• In Ikki Tousen, Ten'i (Dian Wei) was repeatedly raped by her father first. After she killed him and was acquitted of said murder, she was raped again - this time, by the Alpha Bitch of her school and her Girl Posse.
• In Kemono Jihen, Akira's older brother, Yui, was raped by hundreds of women due to the fact that his species only bore one male every hundred years. The experience shattered him emotionally, and the only reason he was able to maintain his sanity is that of his love for his younger brother, Akira.
• Satsuki Kiryuin of Kill la Kill is subjected to sexual abuse by her mother, and it's implied that the abuse has been going on since she was as young as five years old, however her blasé attitude about it comes off as either Angst? What Angst? or Conditioned to Accept Horror.
• Sawa from Kite (1998) as a young teen was the victim of statutory rape by her guardian Akai as part of his plan to brainwash her into being his personal assassin. Given her treatment at the beginning of the OVA, as well as his inclination against ever taking "no" for an answer, one can assume that he raped her more than that throughout her life.
• Yui Kiriyama from Kokoro Connect was nearly raped in middle school and developed a fear of men (androphobia) as a result.
• In the oneshot Kuroneko Guardian, the titular bodyguard is a bifauxnen who finds it easier that people mistake her for a man. This is because she had previously been assaulted when she looked more feminine.
• In the Hentai anime La Blue Girl, this is Kamiri's motivation. She started off as a respected instructor for the Ninja girls of the Miroku Clan, training them in sexual techniques. One day, they were attacked by a male ninja from a rival clan, named Kugutsumen. She defeated him, but fell under his control as a result of a little bit of his semen getting into her. He convinced her to help him steal an important MacGuffin from them, but before she could do that, the other Miroku ninja found out and punished her as a traitor by raping her with a gruesomely-spiked dildo (resulting in severe damage to her vagina) before kicking her out. She and Kugutsumen rape and murder the Miroku women as revenge,using the same device that was used on Kamiri.
• Oyuki of Lady Snowblood wasn't raped in her backstory, but her primary motivation is revenge for her mother, whose family was murdered by four men who then proceeded to rape her. The mother took vengeance upon the first of the men but got thrown in prison before she could take out the rest, and had to charge the daughter she had in prison with the task of killing the rest.
• Loveless:
  • It's far from his entire backstory, but Soubi was raped by his former teacher.
  • Mikado, by Nisei, while Seimei watched. Although she was more traumatized that he didn't give her a reason for it than by the rape itself.
• Maken-ki!: Zigzagged in chapter 48. Otohime reveals that Takaki had been scouted for her talents, by Kamigari, despite only being a second-year student. But when she refused to join them, Ouken Yamato thought she was being prideful and decided to punish her by taking her as one of his mistresses. That is until Yuuka saved her by volunteering to take Takaki's place. Regardless, the incident was so traumatic for Takaki, that it left her androphobic and caused her to become a lesbian.
• Kira of Mars (1996) was raped by her stepfather during or shortly before middle school. She became averse to male touch and shy to the point of muteness. When her mother asked the stepfather back into their home, Kira did not react well.
• Apparently in Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam Reccoa was at some point, though we only learn this in the second to last episode.
  • As well as Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn Marida, who views this as just another order. A cruel but unusual order. But an order she doesn't object to given the fact she was conditioned to be a tool.
  • McGillis from Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans is a rare male example of this trope, having it as part of the giant Trauma Conga Line that is his life and cementing his bitter hatred of people who abuse their power and his desire to dethrone them.
• Strongly implied for Altena from Noir. A flashback shows her as a pre-teen girl, walking aimlessly with her doll in the middle of a battle zone. Then a soldier grabs her, and the doll falls to the ground...
• Chie, also known as Shogun Iemitsu the Younger, gets this twice in Ōoku: The Inner Chambers. Not only was she a Child by Rape, when she decided to travel beyond the area in the castle she was permitted to go while in disguise, was raped by a palace servant who had no idea she was the acting shogun. It eventually led to a decree that the first man that lied with an unmarried shogun would be put to death for 'causing harm to the shogun'.
• Subverted with Miki in Recently, this world has become mine. She had a Meet Cute with a seemingly Nice Guy from her school who she went on many dates with, and was gradually falling in love with him. The day she followed him to his room to lose her virginity to him, she came face to face with a couple of ominously smiling men, with the guy turning out to have been a total scumbag, and she was promptly raped (though it's not shown). The trauma turned her into the seemingly comedic nymphomaniac she is today. After the whole story turned out to be an Afterlife Antechamber/Adventures in Comaland-type situation, Miki reveals that she is still a virgin, with the Miki we've known all along being a character she made up, not unlike an RPG hero.
• Similarly, in Penguindrum it's strongly implied that Yuri Tokikago was sexually abused by her father. Who looks a disturbing lot like Touga's rapist stepfather.
• Played with in Saiyuki with Sanzo's backstory. After leaving the temple he was raised after his master's death in pursuit of his killers, Sanzo is attacked while exhausted and starving to death by some bandits who attempt to rape him. The farthest the guy got was a hand on his ankle before he shot him (his first time killing anything). But it is implied to have not been the last time this occurred, and obviously ties in with his trust issues and dislike of being touched once he's grown.
• Tokyo Ghoul:
  • Mutsuki is implied to have been raped in the past with the scars revealed on his chest when Torso strips him of his shirt and when he's Disguised in Drag he thinks about how predatory Male Gaze is disturbing, imagining the gazes to be included with repeating words like "a girl" and "rape". There's also the parallel between Big Madam and Juuzou in the scene where Mutsuki is soaking wet from his father trying to drown him and his father orders him to praise him. He does so to avoid further abuse and his father leers at him with a predatory gaze while saying "here's your reward".
  • Nutcracker's flashback to her childhood, including a shot of three shadowy male figures with terrible smiles looking down on her while she thinks "I need money". She's a Ghoul that focuses on crushing and eating the testicles of men, and the word she uses for "pretty" can also be translated as "pure". The implications are disturbing, to say the least.
• Legato Bluesummers from the Trigun manga was shown to have been raped by the mayor of the town he was living in, and he seems to have been being kept as a Sex Slave his whole life. Nobody even bothered to name him. He'd just been found out in his ongoing plan to kill the entire town with his mind control powers, and therefore the Hideous Mayor was apparently raping him to death this time when Knives saved him. Accidentally, but still. Knives saved him. It definitely didn't help his view that all humans (including himself) are disgusting and must be exterminated. It's not certain if this is also the case in the anime, where he's still nuts, but it's not clear if he was raped.
• In Tsukigasa, Azuma being raped by his uncle provides explanation both for why he Hates Being Touched, and why he freaks out as badly as he does when Kuroe makes advances on him.
• The H-manga "When I Returned to My Hometown, My Childhood Friend was Broken" (Jimoto ni Kaettekitara Osananajimi ga Kowareteta) by Zyugoya is about a young man named Touma who returns to his hometown after college, and finds his tomboyish child friend Kyouko is now a sheepish and timid woman. The manga's primary focus from hereon is Kyouko's perspective and her coping with anxiety brought on by a group assault heavily implied to be rape that happened in College when Touma was away (and the trauma from the event caused her to drop out and isolate herself). The remainder of the story is Touma and Kyouko interacting, with her battling her trauma against her desire to reconnect, and Touma cheering her on as she improves herself and slowly finds ways to step forward (such as taking a part-time job to get out of the house). The story goes through numerous dates, an eventual engagement and marriage, pregnancy, birth, and then the two protagonists as parents to a tomboyish three-year-old daughter. While it is an H-manga, the rape itself is only referenced as the reason behind Kyouko's behavioral change and is never depicted (the adult content is at the end of the story and is all sex between Kyouko and Touma), and the story tries to actively work it into Kyouko's character such as her claiming she can't tell Touma because it implies she's "weak", and her hair color change as an effort to change herself. By the end of the story, she removes the dye and returns to her old hairstyle (her personality is still timid, but it implies she is working past her trauma and enjoying herself and life again) .
• Wolf Guy - Wolfen Crest:
  • Aoshika-sensei was sexually assaulted when she was a high school student, and later is violently gang-raped by Big Bad Haguro and his Yakuza goons.
  • Also, Ryuuko Kounuma was repeatedly raped by her father and a pimp of sorts. They died soon afterwards.

• One Piece: Jewerly Bonney was the product of her mother ginny being kidnapped and turned into a sex slave by a Tenryubito.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • In some versions of Batman, Damian Wayne is the result of Talia al Ghul drugging and raping Bruce Wayne. However, DC is inconsistent, having also portrayed a consensual sexual relationship between them several times before.
  • Robin:
    • Tim Drake learned Stephanie Brown was almost-raped by a caretaker, making her vulnerable and constantly seeking for approval from men, which even caused her to get pregnant once.
    • Tim Drake learned that Ariana fought off unwanted advances by a classmate. Ariana tried to have sex with Tim (even though they were too young for it) because she wanted to get rid of her unpleasant past with a new experience.
  • Green Lantern: Bleez of the Red Lanterns was gang-raped by Sinestro Corps members, going with the theme that all Red Lanterns are victims.
  • Exaggerated in Hardware (1993) with the character Deathwish, whose origin didn't just involve himself being raped but beforehand had his rapist tie him to a chair and violate and kill his wife and son while he was Forced to Watch.
  • Starfire from Teen Titans was sold to slavery by her sister Komand'r (aka Blackfire) in her backstory, and it was confirmed in the original continuity that she was raped by Citadel members. In fact, she was nearly executed by Komand'r for killing one of her own abusers before they were kidnapped and experimented by the Psions. While she doesn't obsess over the events, certain things can remind her of the abuse.
  • Wonder Woman: (Post-Crisis) The Amazons were made into sex slaves by Heracles. This, as well as many atrocities visited upon them by men, resulted in them isolating themselves from Man's World.
• Marvel Universe:
  • This seems to be the backstory of Hawkeye of the Young Avengers. She was assaulted and strongly hinted to have been sexually molested while walking home one night. She decided to deal with the trauma by taking up a bow and arrow and fencing, dressing up in purple, and beating up aliens and criminals. Her therapist approves.
  • The Black Cat had rape retconned into her backstory in Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do, removing her freewheeling adventuress origin in favor of a rape victim who turned burglar as a displaced reaction to her attack.
  • Lady Bullseye from Daredevil. She was kidnapped and repeatedly raped by the Yakuza, before being accidentally freed by Bullseye, which inspired her to become an assassin like him.
  • Uncanny X-Men #434 lists this as the reason for the villainess' "Take Over the World" plan, on the last page.
  • Kelsey Leigh, the second Captain Britain (later Lionheart) from The Avengers and Excalibur (Marvel Comics). She was sexually assaulted years earlier, which lead to her divorcing her husband (as he was unwilling or unable to help her) and taking sole custody of their two children.
  • As revealed in New Mutants #1, Thai pirates attacked Karma's family on her way from Vietnam to the United States, raped her and her mother, and killed her father. Her mother died soon afterwards.
  • Gamora (seen in Warlock and the Infinity Watch, among others, but now best known for Guardians of the Galaxy) was raised and trained by death-worshipper Thanos of Titan after she was orphaned. When she runs away while they're on a trip, she's beaten and raped by a group of thugs, which provides the impetus for Thanos to rebuild her stronger and more powerful than she was before. Jim Starlin is a very good writer, but he has applied this trope to virtually all of the female characters he's written, including Gamora. Even decades after they have been established. One theory is he was going through his own Cerebus Syndrome.
  • A rare male example is Striker from Avengers Academy. He was molested by his manager as a child and accidentally killed the man after his powers manifested for the first time. In the present, he wonders if the incident is the reason why he's gay, but Julie Power assures him that's not true.
  • Toyed with in the origin of Meteorite/Valerie Barnhardt, a Thunderbolts supporting character. In her case, it was Attempted Rape. While she was serving in the United States Air Force, one of her commanding officers attempted to rape her. She fought back and accidentally crippled the man. The authorities of the Air Force believed his story and not her own, resulting in a dishonorable discharge for her. The only reason she acted as a government agent was that they promised to eventually expunge her record and give her a chance to return to the Air Force.
  • Rape was just one of the many cruelties suffered by young Klara Prast prior to her joining the Runaways.
  • Subtly done with X-23. She was no older than fifteen in NYX, during which time she was a prostitute under a sadistic and violent pimp. As she was legally unable to provide consent to most, if not all of her Johns,^note age of consent in New York City where she was living at the time is 17, while a teenager younger than 16 and older than 13 can legally have sex with someone no more than four years older than them and the fact that she was essentially forced into sexual slavery by her circumstances and Zebra Daddy's violent control over her (who it's implied also raped her), Laura was a victim of statutory (and quite possibly actual) rape. And regardless of her age, her childhood pretty much insured that she wasn't mentally able to give consent.
  • Ultimate Comics Avengers pulled this one out as for the backstory of the second Wasp. Promising scientist, married to an activist, has a baby. Great life, right? Then the Red Skull shows up because he's working for the side the husband is protesting against. The scientist, forced to choose between her husband and child, kills her husband, only for the Skull to toss her baby out a third-story window, then allow his men to gangrape her. She ended up going into bioterrorism, before being caught by the US government, brain-chipped to make her comply with orders, and put on Fury's new black ops team.
  • Inertia in Supreme Power was super strong and durable as a child, but her father thought this unnatural for a girl and forced her to never exhibit her powers. So when some local boys started harassing her and got a little too "friendly", she could only sit there and take it. This was the beginning of her falling out with her father and the start of her general hatred for most men.
• Parodied by Garth Ennis in The Boys when Vouight-American attempts to revamp Starlight's backstory and give her a new costume that makes her look like a porn star. This may be a direct parody of the Black Cat story mentioned above. Starlight did not take it well.
  Starlight: I was almost raped! ME! In real life! And it didn't make me dark and it didn't make me sexual, it made me want to scream until I died!
• Conan the Barbarian: Janissa, Conan's occasional enemy and ally, was raped by demons every night until she could fight them off as part of her training to become a master swordswoman in Dark Horse's Conan Comic Book. Needless to say, people wrote in pissed that the writers were lazy enough to resort to this and her every other appearance in the series inevitably led to the authors apologising, printing the letters of angry readers, and promoting rape help-lines. The writer was Kurt Busiek, and an editor of later issues of Conan, Rachel Edidin, wrote a blog post commenting on reader reactions (part of a series of posts for Sexual Assault Awareness Month: they are all worth reading).
• Sergeant Alexandra "Alex" Brand in the Gears of War comics. She was taken to a "baby farm"(for repopulating Sera) and raped for the first time at the age of 12, and until the age of 18 was raped at regular intervals until her captors realized she couldn't get pregnant and sent her off to the army.
• Parodied in The Invisibles, in which Robin deliberately creates a false memory of being abused by her father as a distraction for the sexually-depraved Quimper, when he tries to Grand Theft Me her.
• In Pride of Baghdad, Safa the old lioness was raped by several lions in a flashback. This is her justification for tolerating the prison-like environment of the zoo initially.
• Red Sonja became the badass warrior she did partly out of a reaction to being raped when she was a girl.
• Whiteout: The US Marshal protagonist is Reassigned to Antarctica after she kills a prisoner who tried to rape her. This event and the death of her husband is shown as the reason for her emotional distance.
• In The Technopriests, Albino and his siblings Almagro and Onyx were all conceived when their mother Panepha was gang-raped by Ulritch the Red and his pirate crew. She spent years amassing a fortune for the sole purpose of buying a ship and hiring a crew of mercenaries to hunt down and slaughter Ulritch and the other pirates in revenge.
• In Alan Moore's Lost Girls, Alice's backstory starts with her being molested by a friend of her father's at fourteen. This gives her a lifelong dislike of men and she becomes a lesbian. She later recounts orgies where multiple people have sex with her while she's stoned on opium. She's later raped by the orderlies at an asylum.
• The Maxx: Mr. Gone, the main villain, is a serial rapist and extreme misogynist. Later it's revealed that he was raped by his aunt as a child, and his drug-addicted first wife killed their son. After ultimately healing from his trauma, he seeks redemption by becoming a counselor to help his own victims do the same.

Fan Works

• In the Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Family Ties this is only implied in the main story for England and Ireland as a reason for some of their behaviour and relationships with other people in their family. In Vincere and the related drabbles it is made clear that this is the case for both of the above- the first by Rome and the second by England, making Northern Ireland an unknowing child by rape and Brother–Sister Incest.
• In "The Other Side Of The Curtain", a LOTR real-people fic, the heroine confesses to her true love Orlando Bloom that she was raped by her brother. This plot element serves no purpose than to give her a reason not to invite her family to their wedding.
• To the Moon: Draco has been molested by his father his whole life.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog Prison Island Break Shadow the Hedgehog was sexually abused at various points in his life. The reason it is not discussed in depth is because, quite simply, he doesn't want to talk about it.
• In the back-story of Origins, the second story of the Streets of Rage Saga, Blaze Fielding had this happen to her multiple times from as early as 12 years old, by a doctor assigned to her case while she was wrongly imprisoned at an insane asylum owned and operated by The Syndicate.
• In the Death Note fic A Cure for Love this is V's Back Story. At first, she is set up as The Ace; however she's the new Big Bad and her Back Story establishes both her otherwise improbable relations to other characters and why she's so unstable. Not only did this horrible thing happen to her but the people who were supposed to be "safe" took her son away from her.
• legolas by laura: the ten-year-old heroine Laura is kidnapped by Sauron "because she got a power and she can distoy us all the bad guys" and raped by orcs and seems surprisingly calm about this. Legolas comes to rescue her and casually mentions that "when I was your age they did the same thing to me", never mentioning why they did this or how he escaped, and it's never brought up again.
• In Scars and Stitches, a Soul Eater fanfiction, this is primarily used for Soul and why he left his home in the first place.
• In the Death Note fic Solitude this becomes Light's Freudian Excuse and does it very believably given what is known about his psychology and character.
• Hivefled's prequel Reprise is Torture Porn focusing on terrible, terrible things happening to Gamzee Makara; Hivefled proper details the aftermath and the gang's plan for revenge/ensuring it doesn't happen again.
• Shadow of the Dragon: Himiko Satome, Tomoeda's district attorney, is revealed to have been raped in the past, her rapist never having been caught. She ended up giving birth to Ryujin Satome, The Bully at Sakura and Syaoran's school, and abusing him, seeing him as nothing but a reminder of said rape. As a result, she turned her son into a misogynistic Serial Rapist.
• In this Maleficent fanfic, Maleficent has rape in her backstory. She distrusts men, but never crosses the line into straw misandrist territory, and is very protective of her boyfriend even before he earns her trust.
• In Despair's Last Resort, it's revealed that one of the boys went through this before coming to Hope's Peak Academy. It isn't specified who it is, but the author and other works in the series heavily imply it's Arata.
• In Once Upon a Time and Again Belle has this as her backstory. She is, as a result, very reclusive and rarely leaves the library at which she works. However, she doesn't seem to distrust all men as a result of it and is very close to her rescuers, Princes James and Thomas of Seaborn, whom she sees as surrogate brothers.
• In New Feelings, Pearl was nearly raped by the fanfic's antagonist Peridot while they were dating. As a result, she's very distrustful of men except when it comes to Steven and her son Jonah.
• Strongly implied with Alina t'Aimne, a Romulan prisoner rescued from the Kazon-Ogla in the first chapter of The Mysterious Case of Neelix's Lungs. (It's known for a fact her CO died a Sex Slave.) She takes special pleasure in killing Kazon after joining the crew of Vetar.
• Played for Laughs with an aversion in My Immortal Parody Fic Xtremly Scray, where Rouge Angles of Satin turns out to be literal: When the OC says her uncle "rapped" her, he literally rapped her.
• Shows up in many ^note  Well, as many as the minuscule size of this fandom allows, anyway... Heat Guy J fanfics involving Clair, who was known to have been physically and emotionally abused by his father, so it's pretty much Fanon that sexual abuse happened, too. ^note  It should be said that many children who are being physically abused are also being sexually abused, though this is not guaranteed. One that comes to mind is called In a Different Light: not only does it have Clair being sexually abused by his father, but mentions that Lorenzo actually paid some college boys to gang-rape Clair at school and made millions promising him as a Sex Slave to multiple men before being true to Canon, killed by Clair.
• In Hobbit fanfic The Monstrous Company of Thorin Oakenshield this is the backstory of all married characters and Thorin. As any Terry Pratchett fan can easily deduce from the title, the whole company (except Bilbo and Gandalf) is actually female. This backstory is the reason why they want to reconquer Erebor; they want a place to live in peace. While others seem to cope relatively well with the (marital) rape, Thorin, having been raped out of wedlock, is so traumatized she becomes insane ... just like in the original, but for very different reasons.
• In the Stargate SG-1 fic "None So Blind", after Vala is nearly raped during a mission, she tries to wave the incident off as it wasn't the first time she endured such an experience. When Cam Mitchell (who is currently involved with Vala) asks her about this comment, Vala explains that she was a virgin when she was initially taken as a host by Qetesh, and one of the first things Qetesh did with her body was have sex with Ba'al. Hearing this, Mitchell speculates that Vala's openness about her own sexual preferences is an attempt to take back control of her own sexuality after such a blatant abuse of her own body.
• As revealed in an extended flashback in Kitsune no Ken: Fist of the Fox, Matsuri suffered this at the hands of her step-uncle, shortly after having moved in with him and her aunt following the deaths of her parents in a car crash. She later took cold-blooded revenge on them and her aunt's lover, and the incident led to her having a very low opinion of sex offenders.
• In "Teen Titans" fanfic Transition, this is how Jinx learned to control her powers, as a kid she already had her weird skin, hair and eye colors and things around her tended to break, so her father sent her to a Pedophile Priest to be "exorcised" with the implication that her dad knew exactly what kind of person the priest was and what he would do to her. Jinx ended up killing the priest by shorting out his pacemaker and running away. The story manages to make Raven cry due to how ordinary it is compared to her own issues with Trigon.
• The Next Generation sees this was part of the backstory as Yumeko is a Child by Rape.
• Much Ado About Shakespeare: Love's Labours Won: Jack Simpson was a sadistic midshipman who tortured all middies aboard the Justinian. His abuse of Archie is explicitly sexual in this fanfic.^note It's implied in canon and generally accepted in fanon. Archie refers to himself as Simpson's molly. He has panic attacks and Past Experience Nightmares because of it.
• Given Yukari's past as a prostitute, Foundling implies this might have been related to it.
• Concerning a Drifter gives this to Satsuki, true to canon, however, the fic expands a bit more on that with the horror that one would think it'd entail. This also drives some of her conflict, as she notes that she "had time to get used to it", while Ryuuko was forced into prostitution, raped, and impregnated four times was left mentally ill and traumatized, along with that, after the latter was hospitalized, she realizes that, while she did move past it (in a way), she hadn't quite confronted her past.
• RWBY: Scars:
  • Attempted rape plays a major role in Roman's backstory, but he wasn't the one who was being targeted. Roman tried to stop a fellow Beacon student from raping a Faunus woman, but Roman was the one who ended up expelled when the woman refused to back up his story. This left Roman jaded and cynical. While in jail, he was asked to do a crime and that started his life of crime.
  • Roman's teenage daughter Neo was raped one day. In revenge, Roman kidnapped the perpetrator and allowed Neo to torture him to death. This is the first time Neo killed and the entire ordeal also fuels Roman's disdain towards humanity. More directly, while hiding from the victim's father, Roman and Neo are blackmailed by Cinder into working with her, thus explaining why they're involved in the plot at all.
• Although Total Drama: Revenge of the Island Mike is a major Base-Breaking Character, it's common in fanworks to give him a backstory involving him getting touched inappropriately at a young age.
• i'll take you somewhere even more brilliant: Homura was coerced into working in adult films against her will. This ultimately led to her Driven to Suicide, though it was an Interrupted Suicide.
• Most of Their Bond revolves around Zelda recovering from the trauma of being abused by Ganondorf and his lackeys from age 12 to 18.
• Used in the Zootopia fanfic A New Dawn. It is revealed late in the story that Dawn Bellwether was raped by a large tiger when she was 16, and the experience was so traumatic for her that it gave her a lifelong fear of predators. With this in mind, her plan in the original film (of injecting predators with the Night Howler serum) takes on a different meaning; she wanted the rest of the world to see what she saw every day.
• The My-HiME fanfic Windows of the Soul. The story takes the darker interpretation of the Ambiguous Situation from the anime as fact, meaning the story opens with Natsuki as a rape survivor and Shizuru as her rapist, and both of them suffering PTSD because of it. The author touches on the Not Herself interpretation that many ShizNat shippers use to justify the relationship, but doesn't explicitly embrace it, as it would be too easy an excuse for Shizuru's actions, although the author doesn't explicitly deny it, either.
• Shows up in quite a few Mobile Suit Gundam Wing fanfics involving Trowa. (The fandom practically imploded on itself over whether or not this should be Fanon, at one point.) It seemed to have originated from a couple of interviews with the creators, one where some fangirl asked if the G-boys had any degree of sexual experience (and despite his reserved nature, Trowa was a "yes," though to what degree, when, or with whom was never explained), and another where the creators allegedly stated that he'd never "tried anything" in his relationships...which some fans took to mean he'd been sexually abused in the past. The usual suspects are the men from one of the mercenary groups he was in (usually the second one), and the {Jerkass heir to the Barton Foundation whose name he took in the OVA.
• The Massive Multiplayer Crossover With Pearl and Ruby Glowing takes place at a support group where people talk about their experiences of being raped prior to coming to the group.

Films — Animation

• Touga Kiryuu was revealed to have been raped by his adoptive father in Adolescence of Utena. The scriptwriter Youji Enokido has all but stated that his backstory extends to the anime series.

Films — Live-Action

• In Forrest Gump, it's heavily implied that Jenny and her sisters were sexually abused by her father. Said trauma leaves her to be a promiscuous drug addict, later on.
• James Bond:
  • In Dr. No, Honey Ryder tells James Bond that after her father was made to disappear by Dr. No, their landlord let her stay on for a while without paying. Then one night he raped her. She avenged herself by putting a female black widow spider in his bed, which fatally bit him.
  • In Skyfall Bond deduces that Severine was a sex trade victim due to her tattoo on the wrist which she confirms.
• Carin, the Straw Feminist of Patch Adams was molested as a child, hence why she distrusts men. Once she learns to trust them again, she lets herself get too close to a crazed patient who murders her. Being a biography film, this would typically go into Real Life except that Carin never existed and was created for the purposes of the film.
• The eponymous character of Chasing Amanda mentions being raped by her brother almost casually. Her uncle is appropriately stunned, but she zips right by it. Her treatment of the subject may be partly due to her tendency to "hide" from her own life, but it still feels like an attempt at cheap sympathy for a movie lacking in sympathetic characters.
• Martha Beck in The Lonely Hearts Killers, though this is Justified, as the Real Life Martha Beck claimed to have been raped by her brother.
• In Wild at Heart, Lula was attacked at a very young age by a family friend; upon learning that, Marietta arranged for him to be murdered.
• You can infer in The Missing (2003) that Maggie's first daughter was conceived this way.
• Mad Max: Fury Road and its tie-in materials all suggest—though never outright confirm—that Furiosa was originally used as one of Immortan Joe's "wives", only to be cast out for being infertile.
  • Joe also had raped all of his current wives except for Cheedo (and even then, the only reason he hadn't successfully assaulted her was that The Dag stood up to him when he tried), and at least two of them are pregnant as a result. In fact, the whole plot of the movie is kicked off by the wives wanting to free themselves and their future children from Joe's tyranny.
  • It's also possible that this is the case for the women used as cattle for mother's milk, as Joe has been a slaver-polygamist for a long time. Basically, if you're a relatively healthy (as in, not terminally ill or horribly mutated) woman living on the Fury Road, there's a solid chance you've been raped by Immortan Joe at some point.
• In Highlander, the Kurgan and Connor meet in 1986 as the last two remaining immortals. Observing the Kurgan's Slashed Throat from his old battle with Ramirez, the Kurgan shoots back at Connor gloating that he killed Ramirez on his knees and "raped his woman before his blood was even cold". Seeing the resultant look of horror and disbelief giving way to cold rage from Connor, the Kurgan realizes that Heather was actually his woman and takes far too much pleasure in the fact that she never told Connor what really happened to her on that terrible night centuries before (he taunts Connor saying she secretly enjoyed it and yearned for him to come back; the likely reality is she dreaded Connor would go after the Kurgan and be killed). This gives Connor all the more personal reason for killing the Kurgan outside of the scope of the Game. In the novelization, this meeting ends with Connor actually thanking Kurgan for confirming his crime, which he always suspected but Heather refused to speak of.
• The eponymous character in the film Rosario Tijeras, a Colombian assassin girl, has that nickname (Tijeras means scissors) because she castrated the man who raped her with a pair of scissors. She also was molested by her stepdad.
• Artemisia in 300: Rise of an Empire saw her entire family raped and murdered in front of her by Greeks and then she was raped and sold as a sex slave, living as such in a ship for many years.
• Faust: Love of the Damned: Jade was raped when she was only 11. She is still plagued by flashes of a faceless man breaking into her room at night. This is later revealed to be her own father, whose body was possessed by the devil.
• As her story is told in flashbacks, we learn in Original Sin that Julia (played by Angelina Jolie) was gang-raped by four men when a scam in a poker game went bad.
• The reason why Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) is a single mom in North Country, as we learn in one of the trial scenes.
• Probably the reason behind Evie's disruptive behavior in Thirteen (2003) as is revealed that she was raped by her uncle.
• The eponymous character Tank Girl was raped by her father at some point in her past, as she jokes about it in one scene. This is likely one of the causes of her eccentric behavior and also the reason why she takes such a strong defense of her 11-year-old friend Sam who is herself almost raped in a whorehouse.
• Bev in It (2017) is heavily implied to have been molested by her father (which is more openly acknowledged in the book).
• Interestingly two of the most modern adaptations of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw give this backstory to the Governess: 1999's Presence of Mind with Sadie Frost and 2006's In a Dark Place with Leelee Sobieski. In the first case due to her father's molestation, in the second after a random attack as a girl.
• One of the many abuses that Alessa Gillespie suffered in Silent Hill includes rape from the Janitor, who catches her in the bathroom whilst escaping the bullying of her classmates.
• Flowers of War: Yu Mo reveals that she was first raped by her stepfather, who then sold her to a brothel before she was even thirteen where she "serviced" countless men.
• In the 1993 horror flick Ticks, Kelly, the shyest of the campers, is there at the rehab excursion because she was assaulted and has had trouble communicating ever since.
• Listen to Me: Monica reveals in the final debate how she suffered this when just fourteen. Tucker at first thinks it was just a made-up story, given that Charlie told one earlier to sway people, but then realizes it's true.
• Slack in Land of the Dead makes clear she was forced into prostitution by the city's government.
• Interestingly this trope is often given to Olga Kurylenko's characters:
  • As Etienne the Brigantian tracker in Centurion; her village was raided by Romans, her father burned in front of her, her mother raped and murdered, and then she herself was raped by the Romans who also cut her tongue out.
  • In Quantum of Solace she plays a Bolivian expat who wants revenge against the General that raped and murdered her mother and sister. She wasn't raped herself by him, however in order to get close to the General she has to sleep with a crime boss he's dealing with and seems truly embittered by it.
  • The reason why her character wants to kill Russian President Arkady Fedorov in The November Man is that her family was murdered in front of her and she was repeatedly raped by him when she was a child.
• M.F.A.: We learn that another woman on campus, Lindsey, was gang-raped by frat boys around a year before what happened in the film. Skye was also raped, as Noelle discovers.
• Compulsion (2013): It's revealed that Saffron, while just a teenager, was raped by a casting director (which her mother arranged to get the part for her).
• Bit: Duke relates to Laurel that while working as a prostitute she caught Vlad's eye. He then turned her and made her part of his harem for years before she could escape.
• Closet Land: The Author was sexually abused as a child, something the Interrogator hints at and questions her about for much of the movie. Finally, in a last-ditch effort to get her to confess, he claims to be her rapist. It's the only major thing we know about her past.
• The New Mutants: Illyana spent part of her childhood as a prisoner of Russian mobsters, who would do things to the young Illyana that made them smile and made her weep.
• For Colored Girls: Tangie was sexually abused by her grandfather. We also find out that Alice, her mother, was abused by her father, too, in the same way. It's also indicated that she had little or no choice in ever having sex with Nyla and Tangie's father.
• Giant Little Ones: Natasha reveals to Franky that she's not actually promiscuous like everyone thinks. In fact, she was raped while at a party, waking up afterward with no memory of what happened (no doubt due to being drugged). Though she seems fairly unfazed by all this, Natasha adds that not knowing what exactly happened is almost worse.
• Jack & Diane: It turns out Diane's sister Karen was sexually abused by some boys who had drugged her at a party.
• Thunderheart: Maggie was raped in the past, inspiring her to open a women's shelter on the reservation. Ray, despite disliking the Lakota at this point, expresses his genuine admiration for this.
• Kimi: It turns out Angela's present agoraphobia results from being raped in the past.
• 68 Kill: Violet tells Chip how she'd been coerced into sex by her asshole former boss, as she tears up doing so. He's immediately sympathetic and comforts her.
• The Dark (2018): We get flashbacks showing how Mina got to be this way, with it shown her mom's boyfriend was raping her, and murdered Mina when she resisted him.
• Benedetta: The reason Bartolomea ran away from her father and joined the convent was because he repeatedly raped her, making her his "wife" after her mother died of the plague. Her brothers also raped her at times.

Literature

• Used to effect in And the Ass Saw the Angel when toward the end, the narrator reveals that he got raped one time. He's already so completely insane that its lack of effect on him feels wholly in-character.
• The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga: In Ice Forged, because the guards at the Velant Penal Colony are usually people who were a hair away from being prisoners there themselves, it's common for female inmates to get raped repeatedly by the guards. What sets Kestel Falke apart is that the first two guards to force themselves on her both turned up dead later, due to her prowess as an assassin. There wasn't a third attempt. Notably this isn't used as a reason for Kestel's personality: in the time we know her she simply takes it in stride as something that happened to her a long time ago.
• Ash: A Secret History: In the very first scene of the book, we learn that the titular protagonist Ash is mentally prepared to thrive in the harshest of Crapsack Worlds. Having grown from infancy with no parental supervision at all (the children in her mercenary camp have to suckle from dogs because even their mothers take no responsibility for them), Ash is raped by mercenaries as an 8-year-old, and kills them, and promises to kill whoever punishes her for that act of self-defense. She is whipped anyway, but decides that her scars are what make her beautiful. It's part of what makes her into someone who's callous and lacking in introspection.
• Beautiful Losers: Edith was gang-raped as a 13-year-old, as described in a flashback. How this affected her is never really explored, but it may have had something to do with her hypersexuality and eventual suicide.
• The Black Company: Sleepy, the narrator of Water Sleeps, was raped repeatedly by at least one of her uncles as a child and young teen. Her justification for joining the Black Company and then sticking with it when their fortunes fell after the events of She Is the Darkness is that the Company is her family now, and it's either stay with them or go back to the blood relatives who abused her.
• In Books of the Raksura, the main character, Moon, a Raksura, never saw another member of his species and didn't even know how they were called or if he was the only one left. Moon was desperately trying to find any signs, anything about his race, until he found a city attacked by the Fell, a race of vicious flying predators who eat intelligent beings. There, a Fell ruler (always male gender) called Liheas tried to brainwash him into thinking he was Fell too and then raped him, after which Moon realized he was not one of them and broke the ruler's neck while the ruler was sleeping, then set the room on fire and escaped. Because of this traumatic event, he stopped all attempts to ever try to find his race, didn't care anymore about himself for a long time, and became cynical, wary and distrustful of others, especially of the Fell and even more of the Raksura.
• In A Brother's Price, this is part of the reason why Trini is reluctant to remarry after the death of her first husband, the rapist. Differs from other examples in that she lives in a society where male on female rape does not usually happen — her sisters don't refer to it as rape, but use the normal euphemism for sex while talking about it, and emphasize the physical violence (the rapist also beat her up) far more.
• Zilpha Keatley Snyder came as close as she could in 1970 to giving Ivy Carson this backstory in The Changeling 1970. This was written just prior to the time publishers began to allow children's or young-adult fiction that dealt openly and frankly with sexual abuse.
• The Change Room:
  • Shar it turns out was raped by a man who'd invited her to a party on his boat near Marseilles. It took her by surprise completely, with her having difficulty trusting men again for a long time after that, and this is the most affecting part of her past we learn about at first.
  • Martin was also groomed by his female teacher in his pre teens, after which she had begun raping him under the cover of a "romance". He convinced himself it was romance, and claimed that his mother was just imagining things after she discovered this, so his rapist got away with this. Only later did he realize what she really did to him.
• In Codex Alera, Odiana was enslaved and gang-raped, at the same time as her empathic powers activated. She is as a result quite mad.
• DS Diane Fry in Stephen Booth's Cooper/Fry detective series. Fry was gang-raped shortly before the first novel in the series. Eventually, she discovers that one of the rapists was her foster brother, and her foster parents helped cover up the crime.
• The Cormoran Strike novel Career of Evil reveals this to have been the case for Robin — though it was foreshadowed as early as The Silkworm.
• Rhian of Creature Court left her house alone during a raucous sexual festival and vanished for several hours. When her housemates found her, she was obviously traumatised, hacking off her hair and burning it and cutting at her arms. She developed severe agoraphobia and a dislike of touch, and refused to allow men in the house. As it turns out, it's subversion - several men tried to rape Rhian, only for her latent powers to manifest and burn her attackers alive. Her trauma is due to horror at what she did rather than rape.
• Carnival from the Deepgate Codex series. It was particularly brutal, and even after three millennia, she's still not over it.
• Deconstructed in Doctrine of Labyrinths. The two main characters have the usual tragic Trauma Conga Line background: Their mother was insane, they were orphaned as young children and the city's underworld swallowed them up. Felix became a child prostitute serving sadistic men and was intentionally hooked up on a mind-dulling drug for the purpose of reducing his resistance (and his pimp was severely abusive, too, up to and including killing some of Felix' fellow child prostitutes). Mildmay's fate as a member of a gang of child thieves looks better at first glance, but rather than being a mother figure, the adult female gang leader took him into her bed at least from puberty on. While neither dwells all that much on the rape aspects of their childhoods, both are seriously messed up psychologically as a result. This background has warped their personalities in ways that make them often unlikable to the audience,^note  Especially Felix, who is downright vicious whenever he's not outright insane, and who starts the plot feeling sort of driven to go abuse a teenage prostitute himself in a moment of stress and only stops himself at the very last minute. Mildmay is more likable, but suffers from extremely low self-esteem and often behaves like a total doormat, just taking Felix' frequent verbal abuse. and their issues are never really "fixed" throughout the 4 books, as they alternately try to change and fail or just completely give up on becoming more healthy in their personal relationships.
• Both the protagonists of the Dog and Spider Private Investigations series have this. Nick was a child prostitute, and his lover wife, later on Jessica was held by a supernatural creature for two years. Long enough for her to develop Stockholm Syndrome which comes back to haunt her when the rapist decides in the second book that Jessica is to become his queen. Though the titular Dog and Spider have become inseparable lovers, The Power of Love does not heal these wounds. It does, however, prompt her to seek therapy.
• Earth's Children:
  • Oda, a Clan (Neanderthal) woman, was raped by a man of the Others (Cro-Magnon), resulting in the death of her baby when she accidentally dropped her. Due to the Clan's beliefs around sex, she doesn't even think of it as rape (Clan women are expected to have sex with any man who asks, with a few exceptions), not understanding why the man was so rough with her when she would've submitted willingly. The main source of her grief is the death of her daughter, though she subsequently got pregnant and had another daughter (unbeknownst to Oda, because of the aforementioned rape).
  • Attaroa, an Arc Villain in The Plains of Passage, was molested by her stepfather as a girl and is strongly implied to have been repeatedly raped by her abusive mate in adulthood. It's a big part of the reason she despises all men.
• Esmay Suiza from Familias Regnant was raped as a kid. That, and even more how her family handles it, gives her major personal issues to work through. She does seek therapy by the end of the book.
• In Fifty Shades of Grey, Christian Grey was 15 when one of his mother's friends and a fully adult woman took him as her sexual submissive in an S&M relationship that lasted several years. He denies that this was rape, and the heroine is jealous instead of disgusted when she meets his rapist, but in any case, it was statutory rape. Considering his inability to differentiate between consensual sex and rape in the relationship with Ana, it is highly unlikely that this sexual abuse didn't affect him negatively.
• Germain from A Game of Universe has Attempted Rape in his backstory. His brother was prostituted out by their father, and then his brother tried to rape Germain in retribution for not attempting to stop his rape. Germain stopped the rape by hitting his brother over the head with a jar of fermenting fruit, accidentally killing him. Germain ran from home before this was discovered and got mixed up in the events that would lead to him becoming a mentally twisted assassin.
• Daniel Gonzalez:
  • Zarate Arkham, the main protagonist of Un grito en las tinieblas (A Scream in the Dark), was raped by her father as a child.
  • At the beginning of the first Ravencraft novel, Laura Talbot is raped by a werewolf - and turns into one as well.
• Guardians of the Flame: Many of the female slaves were raped by their owners or captors in the past. Sometimes it's explicitly stated, but often just heavily implied.
• In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it's never explicitly said what happened to Dumbledore's sister Ariana as a kid after some Muggle boys found her doing magic, but it's pretty heavily implied to have been rape. Their dad went to Azkaban for attacking them because of it, and the trauma of it all caused her to go mad and kill their mom by accident.
• The Heralds of Valdemar series uses this on several occasions. Tarma from Vows and Honor is a classic example: beaten, raped, and left for dead by her clan's murderers. Her partner Kethry also suffered this fate, having been sold into "marriage" as a child and only managing to escape due to the kindness of a servant. Each deals with it in different ways: Tarma by becoming a Swordsworn of her Goddess (and thereby asexual); and Kethry by being forced to confront her rapist and defeat him. There are some Heralds from later novels that also have rape (often child rape) in their backstories — Talia became Chosen after fleeing from a child marriage that would have been tantamount to rape.
• Honor Harrington: Honor has Attempted Rape in her backstory. Lord Pavel Young tried to ambush her in the showers at the academy, without accounting for the fact that Honor was a Heavyworlder in Earthlike gravity. Unfortunately, she reacted to the near-rape in stereotypical female fashion, giving Young time to report his injuries as sustained "falling down the stairs". The academy instructors didn't believe it, but Honor refused to press charges.
• Hurog:
  • Garranon and his brother were raped when their country was invaded, which may be part of why Garranon is very protective of his younger brother even though they're both adults. Garranon also wants revenge, but is sensible enough not to take it immediately.
  • It's also heavily implied that Oreg was raped by various Hurog lords during his slavery (a period lasting over a thousand years). Ward notes his beauty, apparent youth and the Restraining Bolt forcing him to obey orders would make him a very easy target.
• In Death: Eve and Dr. Mira have been raped as children. Dr. Mira seems to have dealt with it, while Eve basically spends the entire series trying to deal with it.
• In the Midst of Winter: After Gregorio's fellow gang members murder him for reasons unknown, they come for his siblings, Evelyn and Andrés. Andrés is murdered; Evelyn is raped and Left for Dead.
• In Isekaid Shoggoth, Alyssa Gillespie's pre-transmigration character suffers a very traumatic near-rape experience and she was the one who got arrested, lectured for hours by the police for "excessive force" for daring to fight back. It turns up in a big way because when a con-man tries to muscle into taking over her pastry store, first with empty flattery, and then with an extremely lop-sided contract, she refuses only for him to call in a notorious orc Serial Rapist and goes full-tilt "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization, stating that all "prissy upper-class ladies actually secretly with to be bedded by a studly orc." She's triggered, shreds the orc savage to pieces and then whips out her own Leonine Contract, get paid a bunch of money and leave the country into voluntary exile, or learn to sleep with one eye open, always on the run. He takes the first option and tries to welch on it with another of her enemies... oh, that was a mistake.
• A recurring theme in James Bond, creepily enough:
  • In Diamonds Are Forever, Tiffany Case was the daughter of a madame who stopped paying protection money to the mob, the mob chased out the hookers and gang-raped Tiffany at a young age.
  • In Dr. No, Honey Rider was raped by the man who oversaw the property where she is currently living. She retaliated by putting a venomous spider in his bed.
  • In Goldfinger, Pussy Galore reveals she was raped by her uncle when she was 12, causing her Rape and Switch lesbianism.
• In John Dies at the End, it is heavily implied that the genesis of Dave's cynicism, as well as the reason he was put in the 'Emotionally Disturbed' school program where he met Amy, was because he took bloody revenge against a bully who had raped him.
• Sister Georgia from Language Arts was raped by soldiers during World War II. She had a baby boy, whom she gave up for adoption.
• The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali: Rukhsana learns to her horror of how both her grandmother and her mother had been raped repeatedly by her grandfather.
• Played with in My Sweet Audrina. In it, the main character Audrina's elder sister is gang-raped and murdered as a child. Though this happens before the main character's even born, Audrina's Ghost Memory of the attack and her parents' subsequent overprotectiveness causes her to fear men and be repulsed by sex to the point of negatively impacting her mental health well into adulthood. Later it's revealed that the rape happened to her and that her parents invented the story of the dead elder sister in order to distance their severely traumatized child from the assault.
• In Nightmare Alley, during a conversation with Stan, Lilith rather off-handedly reveals to him that she was gang-raped when she was 16 years old. This could perhaps provide some kind of explanation for her cold and sociopathic behavior, but at the same time could also be a fabrication and yet another way by which she is manipulating his emotions to control him.
• Seregil, one of the main characters in Nightrunner, is a somewhat unusual example because neither does the character seem to be traumatized by what happened to him, nor does the narrative clearly condemn what would be considered child molestation in a modern setting. Over the course of the first 3 books, we are given the information that Seregil was "seduced" by a considerably older guy, but who was also "not man-grown" yet. Seregil considers this his first love and doesn't seem to have bad feelings about the sexual aspects of this "relationship", only that it turned out the guy was just trying to manipulate him into betraying his clan, which eventually led to Seregil killing a man in self-defense. Seregil hates the seducer and plans to kill him on sight if he ever meets him again, but that's for the betrayal and for his clan's honor - he's still physically attracted to him (or at least his memory of him) and he says "it didn't take much" to seduce him. But the thing is: Seregil was his species' equivalent of 12-14 years old^note He was 22 in objective years. At one point, a character grown up in a human rural setting judges a 22-year-old girl of Seregil's species to be about 14 in human terms. And given that in a medieval setting, a rural 14-year-old girl would most likely not even have started menstruating or developing many secondary sexual characteristics yet (the average onset of puberty, at least for girls, for most of human history was about 16, due to stunting from malnutrition and childhood diseases), that estimate of "22 equals 14 in human years" probably should be read as "22 equals 12 in modern human years" — though it's not certain the author was aware of the much higher age of menarche in a pre-industrial society. at the time; Seregil himself calls himself a "still a child" back then regarding the unfairness of holding him criminally liable for the manslaughter; and book 4 clarifies that the guy who seduced him was "several decades older" than him^note So at least 52, which is almost Seregil's current age in the books, and he looks like he's in his early 20s, even though his birth culture still wouldn't consider him old enough to marry at 58. and therefore not just an older "teenager"; and then the seducer himself mentions that Seregil's family could have had him executed for the "seduction" alone, never mind the instigation to theft and violence. (Plus, at least at this later point in their story, the seducer is perfectly willing to molest Seregil while he's drugged and sleeping, and he sadistically beats him later on, which reads like the character is and likely always was a sociopath.) It's hard to say if the author really just didn't think the age difference was a problem and/or that Seregil was old enough to have a sexual relationship, if only it had been without ulterior motives — or if she meant for the reader to think that Seregil is still in deep denial about having been molested as a child. (Which would not be all that unrealistic in terms of characterization for a child abuse victim who was carefully groomed and not physically hurt.) On the one hand, for all his romanticizing of the memories, he does treat his own young lover (17 when they get together) very carefully and tries to keep him at arm's length for a long time precisely because he thinks as an older mentor he has way too much influence over the boy to ever start a romantic relationship with him in good conscience. But on the other hand, he also still has romantic dreams/memories about his seducer that are presented to the reader without comment, and he is still conflictedly attracted to the guy and overlooks the sexual assault he inflicts on him as an adult like it didn't happen. And the very few other characters who know about this backstory don't comment critically on the age difference, given that this is a setting where it's not unusual for humans to marry at only 15, and where a 16-year-old boy is perfectly acceptable as a customer in brothels.
• Skye and Starr's mom from Orange Clouds, Blue Sky was raped in high school by a popular boy, who got away with it thanks to his rich father. She got pregnant and had an abortion, resulting in lesions on her uterus that left her ability to have kids in question for some time. Her trauma resulted in bouts of depression, which she hid for years until she couldn't anymore.
• Lots of characters in the Outlander series have rape somewhere in their backstory but we only meet Fergus because Jamie managed to interrupt Jack Randall raping the boy.
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower:
  • Sam was sexually abused by a friend of her father's in the backstory.
  • The climax of the story reveals that Charlie was molested as a child by his deceased Aunt Helen, which is a big cause of his psychological issues.
• In Phenomena, this is a part of Sha-ra's backstory. He was raised to be the next bearer of the titular prophecy book, but as his teacher and brother died in a fire. He was taken in by the Winter Bears and tried to live his own life. He became one of the first to become a Dragon Rider, but his destiny caught up with him; it was up to him to find the chosen children who hadn't appeared in 100s of years which was what made his teacher mad and burn his castle down. Sha-ra then became an alcoholic. One day, he saw a beautiful woman who invited him to a drink. He doesn't remember much but followed her into an inn, and later woke up, felt dirty and disgusting and wanted to do anything to forget it. 9 months later, the woman appeared before him again with a baby, he said some things he shouldn't have, and the woman offered to kill the child. He begged her to not kill the child, and she scarred the child and placed a curse on him that the next time he met the child, he would die.
• Implied for Lalasa in Protector of the Small. Kel is convinced to hire her as a maid when she realizes that Lalasa has been routinely harassed and even terrorized by the male servants in the palace, and being in the employ of a single noble would offer her protection that her uncle can't. Later, Kel asks outright why Lalasa is so cynical about men, and Lalasa says that a man "hurt" her and her parents took his side. (In fact, she says it was her brother before quickly amending it to "a man".)
• Realm of the Elderlings: Part of the reason why Kennit, of the Liveship Traders trilogy, is so messed up is that he was repeatedly raped (among other abuse) as a child. This leads to... repercussions later.
• Angel, the heroine of Redeeming Love, was raped at the age of eight and then forced into prostitution by her rapist. Aside from a brief bout with Stockholm Syndrome, the subject of this experience emerged a deeply cynical and lonely Broken Bird, and the premise of the novel is that The Power of Love (unconditional ''agape'' love, not only romantic love) can heal her deep psychological and emotional wounds.
• The Red Tent:
  • It's mentioned that Laban groped Leah and Zilpah when they were young, but before things could escalate further (and before he could hurt Rachel and Bilhah), Leah told her mother Adah, who gave Laban quite a beating. He "made amends" by offering sacrifices, buying gold bangles for all the girls, and setting up a brand-new statue of The Goddess. For her part, Leah doesn't let it bother her or sully her views on men in general, but Zilpah Does Not Like Men at all, and this could be a major reason why. Also, the gold bangles that are among the trinkets used to buy Ruti back from slave-traders Laban has gambled her away to are implied to be Zilpah's from the aftermath of that incident, that she buried rather than chose to wear.
  • Later, Laban's second wife Ruti (who is roughly the same age as his daughters) drinks an abortifacient herbal concoction, so that Laban won't have any more sons she feels he doesn't deserve the honor of or any daughters that he'd molest. When Ruti asks Rachel to help her abort, she threatens to kill the child anyway after it's born. The other women of the camp all support Ruti's choice, on the grounds that they don't care much for Laban or the way he treats her, either.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Ophelia Salvadori's history of being sexually abused as a child is very important to volume 3's story: she was turned into a de facto Breeding Slave for her mother's eugenics experiments by putting her in proximity to desired sperm donors and letting her succubus Perfume do the rest. She was thus forced to bear multiple pregnancies to term before she even turned 15. Despite escaping this life and finding a group of friends at Kimberly Magic Academy, Slut-Shaming over her past and her family's reputation led to her hitting the Despair Event Horizon and embracing the image of the succubus.
• In The Ring, Sadako is raped by Nagao Jotaro, who finds out to his disgust that she has Androgen insensitivity syndrome, an intersex condition that causes the woman affected to be born with a vagina, but with XY chromosomes, no uterus, and internal testes where the ovaries would typically be. Ashamed and humiliated, she retaliates with a massive telepathic attack, but he overcomes her long enough to strangle her and toss her down the infamous well. Sadako's vengeance against the world therefore stems partially from that incident.
• Subverted in-character in Russka, where a young woman from the Ukraine confesses to her fiance that she's no longer a virgin, having been raped by a Tatar when she was younger. (Truth is, she's been in an incestuous relationship with her widowed father for years, brought about due to mutual grief and social isolation, plus her father's alcoholism.) The alleged rape is only alluded to once after that when her now-husband kills a Tatar raider, and by that point, she's forgotten telling him the story.
• Played straight in The School for Good Mothers with mothers Beth and Meryl. Beth, who has a history of self-harm and suicide attempts, was raped at twelve by her choir teacher. Meryl was raped at six and later became a mom in her teens. Both of them tell the others that their mothers didn't believe them when they told.
• Sisterhood Series: The first book, Weekend Warriors, reveals that three bikers raped Kathryn Lucas in front of her disabled husband, and they knew that her husband was disabled and helpless to stop them. Naturally, she was left badly scarred by this. The book has her and her new friends track down the three bikers responsible and give them the John Wayne Bobbit treatment in order for her to obtain closure in this matter. After that book, her attitude remains as combative, confrontational, explosive and fiery as ever, which suggests that her behaviour may simply be part of who she is and not just the result of her being raped... or perhaps that the scars were too deep to be healed by one act of vengeance.
• The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin has John, who was abused by his father at the request of the villain in exchange for wealth and immortality. It continues to haunt him throughout the story and is the reason most of his hallucinations have an uncomfortable, sexual inclination.
• In Smaller & Smaller Circles, Alex's gym teacher in high school rapes and otherwise sexually abuses him and his classmates. This prompts Alex's Start of Darkness.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • A complicated male example. The dwarf Tyrion Lannister met a woman named Tysha, with whom he fell in love and tried to hide from his family because she was not a noble. Then, his father reveals that she was a prostitute who Tyrion's brother had hired secretly for him. To "prove" how she was a hooker, he hires her to have sex with the entire family garrison and then forces Tyrion to go last. This experience naturally scars Tyrion his entire life, until he later learns the truth from a confession by his brother Jamie: Tysha was never a prostitute; she was exactly who she said she was. Tyrion's father, embarrassed that his son had married a commoner, lied, and the scene with the garrison was in fact a gang rape.
  • Although it was just another addition to the huge Break the Cutie process that formed his childhood, Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish was raped twice by Lysa Tully. Both times he was unconscious, the first from having drunk too much after being rejected by the girl he loved, the second at the brink of death and hallucinating because of a feverish wound.
  • This is also implied in the case of Aeron Greyjoy, a.k.a. Damphair. He has a recurring nightmare of his brother, Euron, sneaking into his bedroom at night (namely the sound of the hinges on his door) and doing something unmentionable to him. All but confirmed by Euron himself in a preview chapter for The Winds of Winter.
• The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries:
  • Sookie's Cousin Hadley is mentioned offhandedly at first. She ran away from home as a teenager, got into a life of drugs and prostitution, before finally getting mixed up in vampire politics and murdered for it. As Sookie begins investigating her long-lost cousin's life and death, she realizes that Hadley was also raped by the same great uncle. Unfortunately, Hadley's parents didn't believe her, leading her to run away from home.
  • The backstory of Sophie-Anne Leclerc, the Vampire Queen of New Orleans, is that after a plague killed his entire town except for her and her older brother, the brother (who hated her for some reason) raped her and then sold her to strangers for food and money. The brother is then killed by a vampire, but the vampire still keeps her into forced prostitution until she's turned in a failed attempt to save the vampire's life from vampire hunters. In the show, her forced prostitution is mentioned but not the brother's rape.
• Sword of Truth: Cara and maybe all the Mord-Siths; Darken Rahl raped them often in the past. Along with them being taken from their families and horribly trained to become Mord-Sith, it's all most get as backstory. It mostly serves to make them sympathetic, along with Richard by comparison, since he would never do such a thing.
• Segnbora from The Tale of the Five was raped as a child.
• Tales of the Pack: Corwin and several other women in the Pack were raped before joining, it turns out.
• Tender Is the Night: Nicole Diver was raped by her father at the age of twelve shortly after her mother's death. It led to her developing schizophrenia and becoming the child in her marriage with Dick as she transfers her feelings of paternal authority to him.
• A rare male example in Touch (2017)'s main character, James, and an even rarer example in that he is actively trying to move past it rather than just angsting. The trauma of the event forms the starting point of the story.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Female Mercenary character's fear of sex is explained due to her being sexually abused in childhood sometimes.
• Rosalie from The Twilight Saga heavily implies in Eclipse (2007) that she was turned into a vampire after being gang-raped and left for dead by her fiance and his friends the night before her wedding. Don't worry, though; she definitely got them all back.
• In Vorkosigan Saga, this is part of the backstory for both Sergeant Bothari (who had been forced to work as a child prostitute; he reflects that as far as he can see, the only reason his mother went through with giving birth to him instead of aborting him was that she could make more money hiring him out to paedophile customers than hiring herself out to normal customers) and to Mark Vorkosigan (who, as a teenager, had been tortured and raped by his abusive guardian with a shock probe as a punishment for daring to go out on a date with a woman). Not surprisingly, this affects their sexual development: in Bothari's case, he is sexually aroused by violence (making it easy for Ges Vorrutyer, one of the villains of the first book, to manipulate him into raping prisoners), while Mark, in the first two books in which we meet him, is incapable of having sex at all unless injected with massive doses of aphrodisiac (in Mirror Dance, he comes close to raping a young girl, and is prevented from this not by moral scruples but by physical incapacity). Mark, with the help of psychiatric treatment, eventually recovers to the point where he's able to have a loving, consensual relationship. Bothari never fully overcomes his psychological problems or finds a partner, but, when he is lucid enough to think at all rationally, he can see that rape is wrong and prefers to have sex with (presumably consenting) adult prostitutes, particularly if they 'don't make a noise' - probably because noise could remind him of the sound of victims screaming in pain or fear. And he does manage to be responsible, if overprotective, to his Child by Rape.
• Implied in Nancy's case in Where Are the Children?. Her first husband was abusive towards her and while Nancy doesn't go into detail, she implies their sexual encounters were messed up (with hints Carl forced her to roleplay as a little girl, among other disturbing things) and were something she endured, at best. Nancy recalls that one of the few times she tried to assert herself and pushed Carl away when he did something she didn't like, he was furious with her; she just did whatever he wanted sexually to avoid setting him off even though it repulsed her, as she was frightened of what he'd do if she didn't.
• The Wind Through the Keyhole reveals that Randall Flagg/Walter o'Dim (a Big Bad in the series as well as Stephen King's other novels) had been raped when he was thirteen years old.
• Wicked Lovely:
  • Leslie's brother drugged her and handed her over to his friends to be raped as a way to pay for his drug addiction.
  • Niall is also revealed to have been raped and abused by the dark court after declining Irial's offer of kingship. Made particularly painful when you see the full extent of his scars and realize that they came from the same event. And the fact that Irial, whom Niall was in a relationship with, not only allowed them to but ordered it...many of the fans consider the rape to be a Moral Event Horizon crossing. Oh, and Niall either had to give them himself or the mortals he had enchanted...Give the guy a break already!
    Irial: You entertain the court or they can, gancanagh. Fear and pain is the coin for their ransom; it matters little to me who pays it.

Live-Action TV

• In Justified, Detroit mob lieutenant Quarles reveals to Donovan and Duffy that his father pimped him out when he was a child to get money for heroin. Quarles's proclivity for abducting and torturing male hustlers seems to be a pathological attempt to process his childhood sexual abuse.
• In the episode "The Satyr" of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, it is strongly implied that this has happened to Dolph's mother.
• In Prison Break Gretchen, when she was still going by the alias "Susan B. Anthony," rather creepily tells her hostage, L.J., all about her own abuse at the hands of her captors when she was a prisoner of war, all to explain why he shouldn't ever attempt to escape as she did.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
  • Det. Olivia Benson believes that she is the product of her mother's rape, and it forms the core of her character. Briefly called into doubt in later episodes when Benson questions whether or not her mother (an alcoholic) might have fabricated this story to cover the shame of a drunken sex act, but it's subsequently confirmed that Benson's mother was telling the truth; it was just harder for Olivia to acknowledge when her father became more than just the faceless monster she always pictured.
  • Also Rollins was raped by her superior before she came to the Special Victims Unit, which becomes an issue in one episode when she has to deal with a case where he committed a similar crime against another woman. Eventually, she gets him convicted of the later crime, which seems to help her.
  • It's revealed in later seasons that Brian Cassidy was also molested as a child, which is hinted to be the real reason why he left the SVU (initially, it was portrayed as him being a Naïve Newcomer who couldn't handle the realities of sex crimes^*the Meta reason was a contractual problem with the actor), because it was dredging up too many memories. This becomes an issue in a later episode when he has to testify against his abuser.
• Law & Order:
  • Abbie Carmichael was raped by her boyfriend in law school.
  • Detective Mike Logan may have been molested by a Catholic priest (he says only that the priest "put the moves on" him, leaving it unclear whether it was merely an attempt or he actually succeeded), alongside other kids. A friend also offered him money to be molested by a Catholic priest as a young boy. In the Law & Order: UK remake of the episode, Logan's Expy, Matt Devlin, isn't actually sure himself whether or not he was abused, though Devlin mentions that the priest in question was always eyeballing him, resulting in him feeling very uncomfortable even if he was not being abused outright.
• In Higher Ground, Scott, Shelby, and her sister Jess were all victims of sexual molestation at the hands of a step-parent.
• In The Listener, it's revealed that Charlie was raped by a teacher. This is used to explain why she is so upset about Toby being able to read her mind, because no-one who hasn't been raped is ever protective of their privacy, no sir.
• In a first season episode of Beverly Hills, 90210, Kelly reveals that the way she really lost her virginity was not to her ex-boyfriend Steve, but to Ross Weber, an older boy she had a crush on as a freshman, who took her into the woods and had sex with her. The word "rape" is never used and so the scene is open to interpretation, but a good number of the fans (and Jennie Garth herself) regard the story as a case of date rape. In the seventh season, the show's vixen troublemaker Valerie, is revealed to have been raped by her father since she was 11 until he killed himself when she was 19. It is also revealed that he killed himself because she and her boyfriend had threatened to tell the cops on him if he didn't get help. In the next season, the story changes in that Valerie killed her father in response to him raping her.
• Veronica Mars:
  • The main character herself. Later it turns out she wasn't raped, she had consensual sex with her equally drugged ex-boyfriend who left because he thought she was his sister. Then even later it turns out she was raped after all.
  • There's Cassidy Casablancas, who both had Rape As Backstory and caused it.
  • A prominent story arc in season 3 revolves around a serial rapist on the loose at Veronica's college. Veronica herself was drugged and nearly raped twice, but her attacker quickly ran away both times to avoid being caught.
• Gabrielle in Desperate Housewives. It's casually mentioned in season 1 that she ran away from home after being raped by her stepfather and later referred to as to why she has a cold relationship with her mother.
• James Robson on Oz was a murderer who enjoyed raping other inmates. It is later revealed that he himself was raped as a child.
• The L Word: It turns out that Jenny had been gang raped by older boys, which is most of what's learned about her past, since this affected her so much.
• The Wire:
  • Michael's coldness, aversion to physical contact, and distrust of authority figures stems from his molestation by his stepfather.
  • It's hinted that Cris was also raped.
• Sookie of True Blood was molested by her great uncle as a child. When vampire boyfriend Bill finds out, he doesn't take it well.
• Tasha Yar of Star Trek: The Next Generation never outright says that she was ever raped, but it's pretty heavily implied. Specifically, her mention of how she "learned to avoid the rape gangs" suggests that things might have happened before she learned that.
• A male example with Don Draper of Mad Men, who lost his virginity when he was raped by a prostitute as a teenager, as revealed in the sixth season episode "The Crash." When his stepmother found out about it, she beat him with a wooden spoon and called him digusting, because she assumed that it was somehow his own fault. It is clearly indicated that the trauma he suffered from the whole experience played a large role in forming his unhealthy views on sex, women, and relationships.
• Derek Morgan of Criminal Minds was raped by his football coach as a young boy.
• ER: Dr. Simon Brenner reveals that he was molested by one of his mother's boyfriends. The person he's confiding in has already begun to suspect this, given his reaction to a pedophile admitted to the hospital.
• This is a frequent trope of soap operas—if a heroine isn't raped onscreen, it's often revealed that this happened to her:
  • All My Children. In 1993, when her long-lost daughter came to town, Erica Kane was revealed to have been raped as a teenager.
  • One Life to Live. Luna Moody is revealed to be a rape survivor when she's assigned to be Marty Saybrooke's rape counselor. When she confides in her fiance, he suddenly realizes that this is why she was so nervous about consummating their relationship.
  • General Hospital. Karen Wexler couldn't figure out why she kept freaking out every time she and boyfriend Jagger tried to have sex. But when her mother's sleazy ex-boyfriend came to town for a visit, she began having frightening flashbacks of him approaching her bed, and finally remembered that he had sexually abused her as a child.
  • Two rare male examples on Loving and The Bold and the Beautiful. Much like the "Karen" example, the men in question, Cooper Alden and Jake, respectively, suffered from disturbing flashbacks and an inability to be intimate with their girlfriends. Therapy helped Cooper remember that he'd been abused by a babysitter, and Jake by his uncle.
• Legend of the Seeker: Nicci reveals that she had been raped by a criminal. Instead of helping, the Prelate had told her to forgive him. When she tried, he raped her again. She then was visited by the Keeper in a dream, offering her revenge if Nicci joined him. She did, and became a Sister of the Dark, killing him in revenge with subtractive magic from the Keeper.
• Alex in Nikita. After her parents were killed she was sold into sex slavery.
• Alan Shore of Boston Legal was raped by a friend of his mother's when he was fourteen. It's implied this is why his interactions with women are, in general, so messed up.
• In the Masters of Horror episode "Imprint", the prostitute eventually reveals that a big part of why she's so emotionally scarred is her horrific youth, where she was separately raped by both her father and a local Buddhist monk.
• Cases of the 1st Department: The team suspects that the perpetrator in the episode "Hatred", Ms. Fabianova, was raped when she was small but they don't confirm it because she refuses to answer their questions. Her female lover was raped by an old pedophile when she was a teen, among other unfortunate girls. The old man was Ms. Fialova's first victim.
• Defiance: Pottinger reveals that he was gang-raped by Votan soldiers to Amanda, who then tells him of her own attack so that he'll know he's not alone, which he seems to be genuinely touched by. It's later revealed that Pottinger was actually Amanda's rapist.
• Claire from House of Cards (US) was raped in college. It becomes prominent in the second season after she runs into her rapist (now a Marine general) and launches a campaign to curb sexual assault within the military.
• Very common trope in Mexican telenovelas and many Colombian/Mexican narconovelas. Can border on Stuffed into the Fridge, as it's often used to show how wonderful the man in her life is that he doesn't blame her for it. To quote some examples:
  • Griselda Blanco was raped at 14 by her stepfather in La Viuda Negra
  • Teresa Mendoza (Kate del Castillo) a.k.a. La reina del sur tells how she was raped for the first time by six guys in her neighborhood and then again by her boss, all before turning 18. Her boyfriend loves her so much that he doesn't mind.
  • Yolanda in La Querida del Centauro when she was a kid living in the streets, that's how Cristina was conceived.
  • Again a Kate del Castillo's character, Muriel Cabrera/Maria Anastasia in Dueños del Paraíso was raped at the age of 8 by one of her mother’s clients. She was raped again by mooks in the first episode.
  • Rosario Tijeras as mentioned in the Film section.
  • Also what happened to poor Aldonza by the evil Severiano in La Sombra del Pasado.
  • The central plot in Leonela is her rape and the pregnancy that it caused.
• Maggie in Falling Skies was raped by Pope's gang during her captivity. She killed two of her rapists and turned on Pope because of that. In her own words, one of them thought it was OK because he gave her chocolate.
• Eretria in The Shannara Chronicles was sold to Cephelo as a child and according to her own words "Spent my childhood fighting off Cephelo's men".
• Unlike her comic counterpart, Jessica Jones in the Netflix' TV show Jessica Jones (2015) was raped by Kilgrave, who used his mind control powers to force Jessica into sex with him. Kilgrave's mind control is frequently likened to rape in the series, as it is very intrusive and takes away any and all control the victim has, even if he doesn't physically rape them too (something he does often to women).
• Justine in Penny Dreadful was raped and forced into prostitution, which is one of the reasons for her to join Dorian Gray and Lily Frankenstein's cause. This is coherent with her character as she is based on the Marquis de Sade character.
• Ray Donovan A priest tried and failed to make moves on Terry when he was a child and so moved on to groom Ray before molesting him. Ray got beat up by his father after confiding in him. Afterwards, he moved on to the youngest sibling, Bunchy.
• Britta in Community was molested at her eleventh birthday by a man in a dinosaur costume. Obviously, as it's a comedy, the subject is Played for Laughs, making it a case of Black Comedy Rape.
• The Path: Mary's father pimped her out starting when she was eleven.
• In Game of Thrones
  • Implied to happen to Missandei when she was a slave:
  Tyrion: You don't play games, either one of you, ever?
  Missandei: My master Kraznys would sometimes make us play games.
  Tyrion: There, that's a start.
  Missandei: Only the girls.
  Tyrion: No, no, no. Not that. Of course not that. Innocent games. Fun games. Drinking games.
  • Gilli (Sam's Love Interest) and all of her sisters were raped by their father; her son is his.
  • Not rape but the show portrays how Viserys Targaryen makes unwelcomed sexual advances on his sister Daenerys. In the books, it is much more explicit in the fact that he molested her.
    • Given that her marriage to Drogo is not one she wants, she's arguably raped by him in the beginning. It later turns to love.
• Hand of God: Alicia was raped by an intruder prior to the events of the series. It turns out this was cover to steal PJ's software, and punishment by his mistress for breaking off their affair.
• The Handmaid's Tale: Janine was gang-raped in a basement. Along with the fact that she had a son it's all we know of her past at first.
• What happened to Lou in The Young Riders while she was working as a cleaning lady on a brothel before joining the Ponny Express.
• In the second season of Travelers, it turns out that "Trevor's" host was being sexually abused by his football coach, as were other boys on the team. The Traveler never found out about that up to that point because, historically, the victim died from unrelated events before the abuse could ever come to light, and because "Trevor" immediately quit the football team after arriving so as to not risk another head injury. It's not explicitly stated in the show, but this backstory would certainly go some way to explain why the host was acting out so much, taking pills he hadn't been prescribed, shoplifting, and taking part in a macho, high-risk sport like underground cage fighting. It's quite possible he wanted to die.
• Crossing Lines: Carine reveals that she was raped while held at knifepoint when she was just seventeen, with her rapist never being caught. However, in her case, she brings it up to show that she's put the trauma behind her by the present.
• Switched at Birth: After what happens with Bay, Kathryn reveals her best friend's brother once molested her when she was seventeen. Later Travis reveals that a family friend had molested him too.
• Dear White People: Brooke reveals that a teacher raped her in the past, which explains why she's become so motivated to support Muffy's allegation against Moses.
• Orange Is the New Black:
  • Pennsutucky was raped at least once in her past by a man whom she earlier backed out of consensual sex with.
  • We see that in McCullough's past as a Marine, one of her squadmates had sexually assaulted her. Once she reported this, all the rest of the squad believed him over her, causing her not to help after they come under fire.
• The Witcher (2019): Renfri explains to Geralt as her motive for revenge against Stregobor that he had her raped along with being robbed.
• Almost Family: Roxy is revealed to have been raped by her coach, though it takes her some time until she realizes this (they had been in a relationship but he not only groomed her, at the time she was underage).
• The Rookie: Nyla tells Lucy an older police officer got her drunk one night and raped her. She normally always had her guard up because of the job, but the man was a fellow cop and someone she trusted. He convinced her to relax and have a few drinks at the bar one night after work. After letting her guard down, she ended up getting drunk with him. In her intoxicated and vulnerable state, he took advantage of her and raped her. She was traumatized by the betrayal, but shoved it in the back of her mind and figured she'd eventually deal with it. She never did. She was afraid of bringing it up and never told anyone, including her husband, as she just wanted to move on (the word "rape" was never used, but the context is very clear). Her learned lesson from the experience was to never let your guard down, even with someone you trust. When she was asked what happened to the officer who assaulted her, she said that he later "fell down a flight of stairs" several times. As a result of the "accident", he was forced to take early retirement on disability (it was pretty clear that Nyla beat him severely as her own personal revenge).
• War of the Worlds (2019): It's revealed that Chloe had been raped in the past (and by her brother to boot).
• Peaky Blinders: The Shelbys' cousin Michael was raped at the age of six by Father Hughes, the Big Bad of Season 3.
• World on Fire: Nancy reveals to her nephew Webster that she was once raped years before in Portugal while covering a story.
• Perry Mason (2020): It's strongly implied Alice's mother let her be raped by a man in return for gas when they were stranded out on the road.
• Lovecraft Country: Soon-Hee summoned the kumiho to kill her husband because he'd been sexually abusing Ji-Ah, her daughter.
• The Wilds:
  • Jeannette was sexually assaulted while incapacitated after being drugged.
  • Martha was sexually abused by a doctor who treated her, but at first denies it.
  • In her flashbacks, Becca tells Shelby her stepbrother groomed and abused her.
• Taken: In "God's Equation", it is revealed that Ray Morrison was sexually molested by a man in a shed when he was eight years old.
• The Practice: Jamie Stringer, a young female lawyer who joins in season seven, reveals she'd been date raped in "Burnout" by a man who drugged her after taking a case where a young woman alleged not being hired as a result of being a rape victim. At first she claims to have gotten over it, but later breaks down in conversation with Lucy, who counsels rape victims.
• S.W.A.T. (2017): Chris eventually reveals that when she'd been kidnapped by gangbangers as a girl, they raped her. She didn't report this or tell her family for a long time.
• Feel Good: In Season 2 it's revealed Mae had been sexually abused by men. This is the cause of her drug addiction and PTSD, although she acts quite casual about it at first.
• True Blood has several of these:
  • Sookie was raped by her Uncle Bartlett when she was a little girl. When her grandmother found out about it, she drove him from the house and cut all contact with him.
  • In Godric's backstory, it's revealed that he was turned by a Roman soldier, and was repeatedly raped and abused. When Godric turned 16 in vampire years, he turned on his maker and killed him. This got him in trouble with the vampire community at the time, and he was forced to go on the run for several years.
  • Sam is revealed to have been raped by Maryann when he was 17 years old, which is why he reacts badly when she comes back into his life.
  • Implied with Crystal. She was promised to her half-brother Felton when she was 4 years old, and he's been shown to physically abuse her. Regardless, she loses any sympathy when she chooses to rape Jason in season 4.
  • The Big Bad of season 4, Antonia Gavilán de Logroño, is revealed to have been captured by vampires for practicing necromancy, was imprisoned in the catacombs of the Catholic Church, was raped and tortured repeatedly by them, later got burned at the stake, and then spent the next 400 years in purgatory being driven insane by her inability to move on. When she returns as a Vengeful Ghost in season 4, she is not happy.
  • In season 5, it's revealed that Jason Stackhouse was raped by a female teacher when he was 13 years old. This is one of the few instances on TV when Double Standard Rape: Female on Male is NOT invoked. The show is very clear that just because Jason didn't recognize what happened to him as rape doesn't mean it was okay. It's also all but stated that what happened with his teacher caused Jason to develop a promiscuous lifestyle, and being led to believe his only worth as a person was in sex and nothing else.
  • Implied with Pam. While we don't actually see her get raped onscreen, flashbacks to her past reveal she was a prostitute with a brothel where the men in her time were abusive towards the sex workers there. One man even follows Pam home one night with the intent of raping her before Eric saves her life.
  • Salome (one of the Chancellors in the Authority) reveals she was given to her uncle for sexual favors when she was a little girl. This act demonized her in the Bible as a seductress of men when in reality she had no control over what happened to her. Given the way she tells the story to Bill, she sounds rightfully angry about it.
• Betty: It turns out that Janey had been raped by a friend of hers, but she's initially reluctant to admit this, angrily confronting another young woman who accused him but then realizes he'd done the same thing with her.
• Burden of Truth: Gerrilyn Spence, as a teenager, suffered statutory rape due to being seduced by an older man (he got her pregnant too).
• Parks and Recreation: It's heavily implied that Ron's anti-authority loner attitude stems from his abusive relationship with his first wife, Tammy. Tammy was a candy striper at Ron's birth, was his teacher throughout his childhood, and had sex with him when he was fifteen. While it's not explicitly called out as statutory rape, the effect on Ron is nevertheless clear.
• She's Gotta Have It: Raqueletta Moss says that as a teenager she had been raped multiple times by men to Nola, while comforting her after she's assaulted.
• Dark Desire:
  • Eugenia it turns out was raped years ago.
  • Darío was also raped by his aunt/foster mother, who took advantage of him as a minor.
• Ginny and Georgia: It turns out that both Georgia and Maddie were molested by their step dad. First it was just Georgia, and then when she ran away to escape he molested Maddie instead.
• Impulse: After learning that Clay date raped Henry, his mom Wendy relates to him that she was once raped herself in similar circumstances by a boy whom she knew at a party, making it clear that his offense was inexcusable, urging Clay to make amends before too late.
• City on a Hill: The main thing we learn of Jenny's past was that her father had molested her.
• On Haven, Jordan's Agony Beam Trouble was triggered after being raped by her ex-boyfriend.
• NYPD Blue: Detective Diane Russell was sexually molested for years by her father. It is the root of her chronic alcoholism and is exacerbated when she is date raped while undercover. Eventually, she leaves homicide and goes to special victims so she can help others.
• Accused (2023): In "Brenda's Story" Tess reveals that she was also raped in the past, sympathizing with Brenda as a result. It helps later inspire her to light Brenda's rapist on fire for revenge.
• Two examples from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. While the series heavily employs Black Comedy Rape, it still matters to the characters, and gives explanation (if not an excuse) for their behavior:
  • Charlie Kelly was sexually abused by his Creepy Uncle Jack. Jack is clearly a pedophile who everyone is made uncomfortable with, and while Charlie doesn't admit it, he's always anxious around his uncle. He also made a whole musical about the "Night Man", and how the little boy both loves him and hates him because "you come into my room and pin me down".
  • Dennis Reynolds was raped by his librarian when he was 14. He's not exactly convincing when he says it was mutual, and it's heavily implied (outright confirmed in the PTSDee script) that him being a Serial Rapist who rages at women and enforces consent while never actually getting it is extremely dark revenge for what happened to him.
• The Crowded Room: Ariana was raped by a friend of her dad's. It's all we learn of her past, and key to her issues in the present. It turns out she's an alternate personality of Danny's, and part of how he deals with his emotions over his twin brother Adam being molested. Then it's revealed Adam was just another of his alters, and Danny is the one who'd suffered this.
• In the fifth season of Homicide: Life on the Street, it's revealed that Bayliss was molested by his uncle as a child.

Music

• The backstory to Evelyn Evelyn involves the twins being kidnapped by a man with candy at age six and taken into an orphanage that was a cover-up for a child prostitution ring. Eva and Lynn were quite popular because they are Conjoined Twins. They were eventually kicked out at age thirteen and sent to a Circus of Fear, where it's implied they were abused by the clowns.
• Gorillaz: When Murdoc was nine he was sexually assaulted by a dinner lady at his school. This is mentioned in several interviews and Rise of the Ogre.
• Eminem:
  • While Eminem's Slim Shady character has an inconsistent backstory based on what makes the best rhyming punchline, being raped as a child is a common feature of it - ranging from throwaway Black Comedy Rape ("my teacher sucked my wee-wee in preschool!") to being raped into insanity as a child by his paedophile stepfather in "Insane".
  • Susan, the girl who eats an entire bag of shrooms in "My Fault", reveals to Slim that she was raped by her father as a child - which presumably has something to do with her current problems with heroin and why she's binging on hallucinogenic mushrooms from creepy guys at parties. Slim's unable to handle her freaking out about it, straight up telling her he doesn't care, and sending her into a spiral that leads to her committing suicide by drinking bleach.

Opera

• An interesting variation can be found in Giacomo Puccini's Turandot, in which the Femme Fatale character explains to the protagonist that her ancestor, Princess Lo-u-Ling, was raped and killed by an invading foreign prince. As revenge, Princess Turandot challenges her suitors to answer her three questions, with the terms that, in the case of failure, they will be executed.

Video Games

• Betsy, an elite sharpshooter of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Fallout: New Vegas was raped by a Fiend gang leader by the name of Cook-Cook after her squadmate was knocked out. Although she claims she's fine, her C.O. explains that she's getting progressively more unhinged. The player can convince her to see a counselor and treat her PTSD.
• In the video game adaptation of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison expanded on Ellen's backstory by making her a rape victim in the past: Specifically, she was once assaulted by a man in a yellow repairman's jumpsuit in a halted elevator. AM uses this fact to his advantage in torturing her in the game, by decorating every environment with the color yellow as a reminder of the event as well as having the door to her cage constantly sliding open and shut. However, the player is given the chance to help her conquer her fear and give her the strength to fight back against her rapist.
• It's only discussed in supplementary material, but the Dark Jedi Sariss in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II was raped by her own father Lord Cronal and his Dark Side cultists, turning her into the quiet, reserved, and deadly opponent Kyle Katarn has to contend with in the present.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, it's heavily implied that Darth Sion raped Kreia during her recounting of his and Nihilus' betrayal as she bitterly claims to have suffered "indignities", which is exactly the same word she uses to describe Atton's lustful thoughts. Indeed, her views of the male Exile's attraction towards Visas, disapproving it and calling it "mating" in a dismissive fashion, hint that she doesn't have exactly good memories about sex. What makes it even worse is that Nihilus just stood there emotionlessly watching the whole thing.
• Metal Gear:
  • Otacon's social awkwardness in Metal Gear Solid was explained in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty as the result of being seduced by his Wicked Stepmother at around age 17, which depending on the U.S. state they resided in could be seen as statutory rape. Later his father committed suicide by drowning himself in the family's pool after he learned of it, and his step-sister nearly drowned from his Taking You with Me attempt and is still terrified by water due to that.
  • Subverted by the Beauty And Beast unit in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, despite the horrible tragedies afflicted upon them. None of them were supposedly raped by the soldiers in the past. However, what happened to them is pretty much Mind Rape in the worst way possible.
  • Both Chico and Paz were raped in-between Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, which justifies their drastically darker personalities in the later game and the Darker and Edgier tone.
  • Made even worse in Ground Zeroes after Big Boss has his medic on the copter hurriedly pull a bomb out of Paz's stomach, only for Paz to attempt to jump out of the copter to save them saying there's a second bomb. Fridge Horror ensues when you realize the only two possible places her captors could have hidden that second bomb while the obvious fresh stitches on her stomach for the first bomb provided a distraction.
• In Mass Effect 2, Jack has apparently been repeatedly sexually abused. Unlike many characters, though, Jack doesn't apparently angst over it; it says something about how screwed up her life is when being sexually assaulted is one of her least traumatic memories.
  • When talking about her escape from the Cerberus lab, Jack mentions that she hitched a ride on a transport freighter, and that "the crew used me, then sold me." It's spoken with the same casual tone one would associate with getting the mail or ordering coffee, which makes it all the more chilling.
    • She seems more emotionally involved when she describes being caught by guards in the toilet and beaten and raped while she was in prison. Though the emotion in that is mostly restricted to her description of later killing her attackers.
• In Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, Kotoko Utsugi's reason for being an Adult Hater is that her Abusive Parents forced her into the Casting Couch at a young age to further her career.
• In Dead or Alive, Ayame, the wife of the leader of the Mugen Tenshin clan, was raped by a rogue ninja named Raidou. As a result, she would give birth to Ayane. The truth of Ayane's origins was kept a secret from her for years, and when she finally learned where she came from, it changed her profoundly.
• Although not the actual rape victim, Luca Blight from Suikoden II was forced to watch the rape of his mother, the Queen, on the hands of bandits hired by the Muse mayor. . Luca will hold a deep grudge against his father because of his perceived inaction, culminating in the prince killing the king with a poisoned chalice. His sister Jillia is the result of the rape, and the queen descended into severe depression.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
  • Sapphire, a member of the Thieves' Guild, had her family murdered by a bandit gang, which then took her back to their camp to be gang-raped for two weeks. Then she managed to get her hands on a knife and slaughtered them.
  • Astrid, the leader of the Dark Brotherhood, had a Creepy Uncle who made certain "unwanted advances" on her, resulting in him becoming her first kill.
  • In the Dawnguard DLC, Serana and her mother are "Daughters of Coldharbour" and became vampires during a rite to the Daedric Prince Molag Bal. Molag Bal, known as the King of Rape, raped a girl to make the first vampire, and it's heavily implied that event is re-enacted during this rite. Neither of them likes to talk about the details.
• One of the files in the Whistleblower DLC of Outlast reveals that Eddie Gluskin was raped by his father and uncle as a child for years and to such a severe degree that the Murkoff document even refers to the abuse as "traumatically violent." He's dissociated from the memories so hard that he insists that he actually grew up in the TV show Leave It to Beaver, and when shown pictures of the abuse that his father and uncle took, he'll either fly into a violent rage or try to laugh it off and say the pictures are fake.
• Rapha from Final Fantasy Tactics is implied to have been raped by her surrogate father, Duke Barrington. Her brother Marach is unaware of this, holding the Duke in great regard for taking them in after their village was razed, unaware that the Duke ordered the village to be destroyed when they refused to hand over the children to him so he could exploit their powers.
• A few of Niles' supports in Fire Emblem Fates imply he was subject to this before becoming Leo's retainer. It's downplayed, though, as it's shown his abandonment issues, bitterness at growing up in poverty, and hatred of the rich that make up the bulk of his issues.
• Packie of Grand Theft Auto IV eventually tells Niko that he and his brother Gerry were molested by their father. His sister Kate mentions it as well, and evidently hates herself for not intervening.
• In Yakuza 0, it turns out the reason Makoto is blind is due to the psychological trauma of having been sold into Sex Slavery by Oda, where she remained for some time before being rescued by Lee.

Visual Novels

• Characters with these backstories feature in just about all the works in the Nasuverse. Kohaku (Tsukihime), Sakura Matou (Fate/stay night), and Fujino Asagami (The Garden of Sinners). Yes, they all went crazy, really crazy.
• Mystic Messenger: Rika's DLC reveals that when she was a child being raised in an devout, abusive Christian household, she was repeatedly sexually abused by her adoptive family's pastor.
• Higurashi: When They Cry:
  • Three boys attempted to rape Rena Ryuugu, who still went under the name Reina, at her old school. These are the same boys she beat with a bat when she was at a certain level of Hinamizawa Syndrome.
  • In the manga, it's revealed that the Big Bad Miyoko Tanishi aka Miyo Takano was violently raped in the Orphanage of Fear that she was stashed in until her grandfather rescued her.
• Piofiore: Fated Memories has a rare male example. Henri Lambert as a young adult was repeatedly sexually abused by an older girl in exchange for food. As a result, he finds it very difficult to be touched by others and to eat food in general.
• In Umineko: When They Cry, Beatrice Ushiromiya unfortunately grew up to look identical to her deceased mother, leading her father Kinzō to lose it and eventually rape her. The result is the third Beatrice. When learning how (s)he was born, (s)he doesn't take it well.
• The second thing that started the screwed up life of Shinji in Kara no Shoujo. And it only got worse from there.

Webcomics

• In A Modest Destiny a character is bizarrely unhappy that she doesn't have a rape backstory. Instead it was attempted rape, and what happened instead mentally scarred her for life. Yes, this is a webcomic.
• Dominic Deegan has two characters with a back story like this. It's debatable whether the love interest of the protagonist would count, since she consented beforehand, but was heavily pressured into it and was verbally abused immediately after. The character Melna, however, was raped by Stonewater in one of the most mind-boggling arcs in the entire series, in what was essentially a mix of Scarpia Ultimatum, Mate or Die, and Rape by Proxy that effectively victimized both of them.
  • As for Luna, it's generally accepted that if one participant is under emotional duress and would not have consented if mentally sound, it is rape.
• Boudica in Shades: She is a Historical Domain Character and the event happened. 2000 years later and she still isn't quite over it.
• It's revealed in the Interview section for the characters of Flipside that Umber was raped as a girl.
• Averted in Jackie Lesnick's Wendy: The comic ended before Jackie could introduce this trope and further send her series into full-blown Cerebus Syndrome, and only revealed her original ideas for the ending after she finally went back and tied up all the loose ends years later.

Web Original

• Both referenced and played very, very straight in Touch (2017)'s child protagonist, James, who spends much of the first chapter trying to figure out how to get everyone in his family to forget about it so that he can just move on.
• Shin in Sailor Nothing. A rare example of it being done just right — she's mostly gotten over it, but it does subtly color her character. When she realizes Himei is going to be raped, her reaction is heart-rendingly visceral.
• Survival of the Fittest has several characters in version one and the version two pregame (most characters in version two proper either retconned it out or didn't use it to begin with) who mention having been raped in their profile, to the point that some handlers were exasperatedly asking if anyone had not been raped.
• Scratch from We're Alive reveals that she became pregnant as a result of rape and had an abortion which left her sterile. She now treats Lizzie and her unborn baby as something of a Morality Pet.
• The Nostalgia Critic was date-raped when he tried to go to prom. When he's raped again by Spoony, he's so traumatized he can't speak, but then goes into Rape is Love mode.
• The Nostalgia Chick was molested by her uncle when she was a child.
• Demo Reel:
  • Rebecca is another case of Creepy Uncle, which admitting while stoned is what drives Tacoma to try and look after her. Grossly, her parents sent her on camping trips with the guy.
  • Donnie was raped by someone who wanted to reenact the sexual assault scene from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but the horror for Rebecca and Tacoma mostly comes from just how casual he is admitting that it happened.
• In Berserk Abridged Casca tells Guts about the time she met Griffith, who saved her from being raped by a nobleman. Guts, in response, tells her that his backstory is a bit different. Word of God is that he intentionally didn't play any of the sexual abuse for laughs, though this scene does contain a level of Black Comedy regardless.
  Guts: And do you know who showed up just in the nick of time, and gave me a sword and a blanket, and taught me to believe in myself?
  Casca: Was it Jesus?
  Guts: NOBODY!
• Hellsing Ultimate Abridged plays its two backstory rape instances for very Black Comedy, but never in a way that detracts from the horror and justified angst of said backstories.
  • Episode 6 has Seras tell Pip that nothing happened when she grew up in Leeds, despite the flashback slideshow telling a very different story. Episode 7 shows us exactly what happened, and it is as horrifying as you guessed.
  • Despite all the pedopriest jokes Alucard likes throwing around, he is very much the same Vlad Tepes Dracul that everyone knows and fears. Ten years of sexual assault would leave someone with a lot of pent-up aggression, something even God acknowledges.
  Alucard: [The source of my anger] was the ten years of rape! Nailed it like the fucking Romans!
• Can You Spare a Quarter?: Jamie was used as a Sex Slave by his Abusive Parents and had to trade sex in exchange for food and a bed before meeting Graham. Because of this he has a cynical approach to men and is constantly worried about what Graham might do to him if he displeases him.

Western Animation

• Agnes Sculptham on Moral Orel. Although it was not part of her "backstory" at the beginning of the show, it was revealed in the third season this had occurred offscreen at one point sometimes between "Courtship" and "Alone."
• The vampire Lilly in Todd McFarlane's Spawn describes herself as someone who was raped and murdered by the last Spawn.
• Archer:
  • Cheryl was regularly sexually abused by her grandfather as a child — when she tells the team that he would use the Tunt family mansion's tunnels at night to "check on the children", she immediately becomes quiet and distant. Everyone immediately understands what she means and are all visibly appalled.
  • Archer was raped by his Brazilian nanny when he was twelve, which Malory excuses by saying that the woman apparently didn't know America's age of consent laws.
• Sarah Lynn in Bojack Horseman is heavily implied to have been molested by her bear stepfather (who was designed to resemble Terry Richardson). This, however, is Played for Laughs and used as Gallows Humor up until she wins an Oscar and he has to accept it on her behalf; seeing him immediately changes her demeanor from ecstatic to dejected.
• Sexbot Six in Tripping the Rift mentions in one episode that her life as a Sex Slave under the Clown Empire was horrible, to the point that she'd rather self-destruct than be taken there again. Chode also mentions in another episode that he was a prison bitch during some of his time in jail; however, this is more Played for Laughs and is unclear if he was actually raped or was at least somewhat consensual.
• Megara's words to Hercules in Hercules leave not much room for interpretation.
  Well, you know how men are. They think "No" means "Yes" and "Get lost" means "Take me. I'm yours."
• Foxxy Love in Drawn Together remembers been gang-raped by Phat Allen and his Junkyard Pals (a parody of Bill Cosby's Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids) as a preteen as shown in the episode "Toot Goes Bollywood", whilst looking for the reason behind her promiscuity, and the episode also criticizes judicial Victim-Blaming. However, it turns out that the memory of the gang-rape was implanted (the episode aired long before Cosby's scandal for sexual assault, thus is probably not related and just a coincidence).
• In the Tuca & Bertie episode "The Jelly Lakes," Bertie reveals to Tuca that she was molested by a lifeguard when she was twelve, which destroyed her love of swimming.
• One Robot Chicken sketch's explanation why Disney villains like Jafar don't really get a backstory song is shown when Jafar barely finishes his first verse explaining he was molested before Iago quickly shuts the number down.
• Parodied and inverted in an episode of South Park in which Garrison tries to confront his father over childhood sexual trauma. But since Garrison is such a maladjusted person, it turns out his "trauma" is that he was not raped as a child, which he thinks means he wasn't good enough for his father.

---