The Women Are Safe with Us

"That much, at least, his wife and daughters had been spared. Spared, because by good fortune their own house had been seized by Rajputs during the sack, not Ye-tai or common soldiers. A Rajput cavalry troop, commanded by a young Rajput lord. A cold man, that lord; arrogant and haughty as only a Rajput kshatriya could be. The Rajputs had stripped their home of everything of value, down to the linen. Had then eaten all the food, and drank all the wine. But when the inevitable time came, and the cavalrymen began eyeing their captured women, the Rajput officer had simply said: No."

— An Oblique Approach

The tendency of movies to depict the villain's associated armies, tribes, barbarian hordes, and bands of mercenaries as being prone to raping the women of a town they're overrunning, while the armies, tribes, barbarian hordes, and mercs that are working for the hero are usually innocent of this particular atrocity.

In modern times, it would preclude all audience sympathy to portray a heroic character as having a tolerance (or even worse, a taste) for forcing himself on captive women. A protagonist may have other character flaws; may plunder the enemy's gold, burn the enemy's crops, torch the enemy's buildings, or visit bordellos, but in most stories, there will be no rape or tolerance of it in his outfit. Rape will be forbidden, and malefactors will be dealt with.

Movies that involve historical generals, chiefs, or warlords will generally treat it as a given that they didn't tolerate such things unless such leaders are the villains of the work. Sometimes, the all-too-common occurrence of officers who did disapprove being limited in their ability to control their men will be shown, since it still leaves the hero sympathetic.

Although we'd never tolerate it from a hero, rape remains one of the many depraved types of behavior we may expect from a villain. Villains being villains, rape while pillaging will still be the order of the day when the evil enemy soldiers attack a village full of protagonists and will be used to underline exactly how ruthless and vile The Enemy is. Individual mooks might be above this, but an army full of them... not so much.

Often a case of Values Dissonance. Behavior that was often tolerated or even approved strikes us as horrifying and disgusting and gets reserved only for the villains.

Also possibly symptomatic of The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything. Whichever side we, the audience, are supposed to identify with is simply going to be assumed not to do that sort of thing, whatever their attitude to other atrocities.

Too many aversions go to the opposite extreme, painting whatever era or world they're set in as a No Woman's Land Crapsack World, which is an oversimplification at best, sometimes outright Demonization. At the same time, this trope was played straight throughout history and in fact was more likely to happen than not. Commanders like to maintain discipline and order amongst the ranks, an army without either is basically a mob, and there are few better ways to cause such breakdown than letting the troops run wild over womenfolk. Real Life Pirate Codices (pirates, due to being confined to very limited space, required the strictest discipline of all), tellingly, often had a clause for severely punishing the rape of female captives, execution on the spot being common enough. Throwing the captive women overboard was still fair play, though.

Modern audiences like to be told that they're much more civilized than their ancestors, even if their ancestors have to get varying degrees of Historical Villain Upgrade in the process. History itself is often taught this way, as well, because it's useful to whatever ideology dominates an educational system to try and show how much better the ideology has made things since the Bad Old Days.

Black Comedy may invoke Aren't You Going to Ravish Us?.

See also Politically Correct History and Historical Hero Upgrade. Subversions often involve Historical Villain Upgrade, Crapsack World, No Woman's Land.

As with all Sexual Harassment and Rape Tropes, No Real Life Examples, Please!

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Blade of the Immortal: Played straight when the villains from the Itto-ryu are explicitly allowed by Anotsu, their leader, to rape Rin's mother (but not Rin herself, as "raping children shows no class"). Subverted when Magatsu, a member of the Itto-ryu, tries to stop the other men from doing so. Averted when, much later on, Manji and Rin temporarily join forces with Shira, from the Mugai-ryu. Raping and torturing innocent prostitutes was one of the things that made Rin, Manji, and the reader realise that Shira won't be on the heroes' side for long.
• Wolfgang Mittenmeyer in Legend of the Galactic Heroes has made it one of his main principles to maintain this trope whenever possible. He caught the eye of his future superior Reinhart von Lohengramm when he executed a noble-born soldier under his command for the crime of war rape. We later get to see him repeat this during the Phezzan occupation, where he instates — and enforces — a strict policy of death by firing squad to any occupation forces caught doing this.
• Fist of the North Star: Played with. While being the most iconic villains of the show, Shin and Raoh are also chivalrous to a fault and try to win Yuria's affection without touching her (and any of Raoh's soldiers that try to be anything else will be executed). Another villain, Yuda, keeps a harem of slave girls but does not rape any, although his case is special. On the good guys' side, Juza is a handsome, lecherous Magnificent Bastard who frequently raids slave caravans to take the girls to his pleasure palace... except if they ask to go home, in which case he will even give them food for the trip.
• In Fushigi Yuugi, Tasuki's men attack the protagonists, but (unlike other bandits in the series) have no interest in raping Miaka or taking her to sell as a Sex Slave. They do take notice of Hotohori and Nuriko, but even then don't attack them sexually. Tasuki nearly rapes Miaka while possessed in one of the OVAs, but is able to stop himself...and feels deeply ashamed for doing so.
• Played with in Eikou no Napoleon: Eroica: at the start of the First Italian Campaign Napoléon Bonaparte denies his men the right of sacking (that is, Rape, Pillage, and Burn), but this isn't out of the goodness of his heart but to make the people of the area they're invading more sympathetic (and in fact he's explicitly shown giving it to the Army of Egypt for the Battle of the Pyramids. Immediately followed by announcing that the enemy Mamluk cavalrymen they're about to face go at war wearing large amounts of gold jewels). The end result is that the civilians willingly give them more than what they would have got by sacking: that is, the cities of all Italy (and not just the ones getting occupied) send them the supplies they needed and lavish gifts, and the women of Milan accept having consensual sex with the invaders.
• Vinland Saga: Subverted. While the protagonist Thorfinn doesn't partake in any rape, he does nothing to prevent it either, and not even out of pragmatism or fear of alienating the other Vikings: he simply doesn't care.

Comic Books

• The Punisher: During his days in Vietnam, Frank Castle took a very dim view of any of his men raping enemy women. In one major instance during the Born miniseries from the MAX imprint, he put a bullet into the head of the VC sniper that one of his men was raping, telling him, "No rape. We're here to kill the enemy." Said rapist would ultimately get drowned under Castle's boot as punishment.
• Red Sonja: After becoming Queen of Songaria, Sonja (a rape survivor herself) expressly forbids her soldiers from raping and is thoroughly displeased after hearing they tried to do that to one of her enemies' little sister. Due to the men who sought to rape the girl being killed by her big brother, she doesn't punish the others outright but forbids them from laying a finger on her and promises a severe punishment if they try it again with anyone.

Fan Works

• Actually inverted to a degree in the Command & Conquer fan-novelization Tiberium Wars, where the Brotherhood of Nod considers rape — especially of prisoners of war — to not only be a serious criminal offense, but one punishable by summary execution. This is shown when a Nod soldier tries to rape a female GDI prisoner, only to have a member of the Black Hand smash down the door, beat the would-be rapist's head against the wall before throwing him out a window, and having the rapist's friends executed for letting it happen.
• The Night Unfurls: Played straight, considering the main antagonist is an Army of Thieves and Whores. Any time the mercs or orcs overrun a village, there will always be imagery of naked, defiled women being either dead a while ago, or are currently raped by them. On the contrary, this never happens for the military of Eostia.
• Harry Potter fanfic Dungeons & Drow: Played with Harry's new pet, the titular Drow. Harry doesn't intend to torture or rape her because it's a waste of a potentially useful tool but admits that should she attempt to flee or kill him then flee, she will be captured and raped by his men.

Films — Live Action

• The Birth of a Nation (1915) is all about the Ku Klux Klan killing black men and carpetbaggers who raped white women.
• The 300 Spartans has the evil King Xerxes ordering that his soldiers on the campaign be given one last night with their wives, then the women are to be killed. Yes, women from his side. "There are plenty of women in Athens and Sparta and I want my men to be eager to get at them". Perhaps the audience wasn't quite sure he was the villain of the movie yet. How the Spartans treated the enemy women is of course not discussed.
• Both Dances with Wolves and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves have brief, PG-13 references to this. Enemy warriors attack the protagonist's village (Pawnee tribe in DWW, Celt marauders in RH). Each contains a quick scene where a helpless female villager is at the mercy of a clothes-ripping invader, who is immediately shot dead by a friendly.
• Both played straight and averted in Spartacus. The gladiator students (who are slaves) are, as a perk, given women (also slaves) to spend the night with. Varinia meekly prepares to go through with it, her sense of dignity long since subjugated by her survival instinct. But Spartacus will have none of it - especially since his owners are leering to watch the show. Whether he's reluctant to take advantage of Varinia, simply appalled by the idea of performing for an audience or both is not made 100 % clear. Averted in that the other women with the other gladiators are almost certainly being ravished. In spite of this, the other gladiators later form Spartacus' army and retain audience sympathy.
• Braveheart features the occupying English attempting to rape Murron in her town. Later in the movie, Wallace's army of Scots attack and sack the city of York. The head of the city's lord is sent back to London. The audience is left to draw their own conclusions as to how the Scots treated the other townsfolk of York.
• In The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Joan's sister is murdered and raped (in that grisly order) by the villainous English knight. There's no record, by the way, of this having happened.
• Pirates of the Caribbean:
  • Captain Jack Sparrow embraces every stereotype of a pirate... yet somehow, we know that because he's a "good" character the women he comes across are pretty well safe. Note the careful wording of his criminal intentions in The Curse of the Black Pearl.
    Sparrow: All right then, I confess: It is my intention to commandeer one of these ships, pick up a crew in Tortuga, raid, pillage, plunder, and otherwise pilfer my weasely black guts out.
  • Even the antivillainous Barbossa abides by this... up to a point. When Elizabeth rejects his No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine proposal in the first film, he says that the alternative is to dine with the crew and without the dress he was offering her.
  • Barbossa seems to have a curious reverence for women (and for what he's pleased to term "heathen gods"); observe his behavior with Tia Dalma in the later movies. Doesn't seem to stop his men from harassing servants and maids when they raid Port Royal, though.
• Troy both supports and avoids this trope, depending on how much we're supposed to identify with the character. Achilles' nameless soldiers behave the way you might expect an ancient army to towards Trojan captive Briseis (not well). Achilles' lieutenant Eudorus also sees her as a prize to be enjoyed by his boss and is not chastised for his attitude. Agamemnon, being the dastard of the film, naturally feels the same way. Audience-courting Achilles however, is shown to be respectful of Briseis. The script takes pains to show that sex between them is consensual. Achilles even rescues her from rape at the hands of his men (out of altruism, it seems, not jealousy). On the other hand, in Homer's The Iliad, Briseis is seized by Achilles and later Agamemnon as a prize. Her consent, or lack thereof, is not treated as a concern either way.
  • Achilles constantly refers to Briseis as his wife and bride, indicating it's of some concern to him (though they had weird attitudes about rape, Greeks generally thought taking a love-interest purely by force was unkind — Plato thought it was one of the things that made Zeus a Jerkass^note Or rather, that made the myths written by poets a blasphemy for portraying Zeus as a Jerkass, since Plato, an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries, didn't consider the poets' myths canon). That her feelings might not be a concern to Agamemnon seems to be part of why he's angry Agamemnon took her, and why it's very important Agamemnon swears he never touched her when he gives her back. They were fighting a war over that kind of thing, after all.
  • In the myth, Achilles isn't all that interested in raping Briseis either, or really doing anything with her until she is taken away by Agamemnon. She was Achilles' honor gift, taking her back was a major insult, and Achilles was very upset about the insult, but not so much about the presence of the actual person. Furthermore, high-ranking female captives were mainly used as a display of power in Homer's epics, and their duties involved such things as serving wine to guests.
• Averted in Flesh+Blood (1985). A slimy nobleman cheats a band of mercs, and it looks like it's going to be an old-fashioned revenge flick until Martin and co. capture and gang-rape the betrothed of the nobleman's son. She pretends to enjoy it in order to get the protection of Martin against his fellow soldiers but eventually develops feelings for him (at one point saving his life from plague-infected drink after having allowed his comrades to be exposed), which is all that saves him from being the undisputed bad guy of the flick (for the story's purpose, that is; this does not and ought not fly in real life). It quickly becomes an open question of who to cheer for then.
• Clumsily handled in Deathstalker, which contains a scene where the antihero forces himself on a female character, presumably to show that he isn't all that good.
• The Magnificent Seven (1960): The villagers hide their women because they're afraid the hired guns will rape them. Chris acknowledges that their fears are not entirely unjustified (not all gunslingers being as noble as the seven, after all) but opines that "you might have given us the benefit of the doubt."
• In Seven Samurai, a father is so terrified that his daughter will be raped by the samurai that he cuts off her hair to disguise her as a boy.
• Captain Blood: Blood's ship has it as an explicit rule that no one will mistreat any woman nor take them prisoner in the first place. He kills one of his partners over it.
• King Arthur (2004) uses a twist on this trope: the good Roman knights don't rape. The villainous Saxons are shown attempting to rape a woman but the Big Bad stops them, arguing they shouldn't dilute their bloodline. One of the soldiers claims it's his right and is stabbed for his trouble. The Big Bad then kills the woman. Whether this is meant as a hate crime or because he knew he couldn't protect the woman for long is left ambiguous.
• In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lo uses this to convince Jen that he's not a bad guy. It doesn't work at first.

• Zig-zagged in Stalingrad (1993). Near the end of the film, the platoon discovers a Russian woman tied to a bed whom Captain Haller has been keeping as a sex slave. Some of the soldiers suggest "taking turns" with her, but Lieutenant Von Witzland ultimately enforces this trope.

Literature

• The A Song of Ice and Fire series, which painfully deconstructs everything else about medieval-style life and the stereotypical Knight in Shining Armor, hits this one as well.
  • Soldiers from every army involved in the War of the Five Kings are shown engaging in various atrocities, including, quite frequently, rape — regardless of whether they support the protagonists or not. A few nobles have edicts against their men raping (most notably Daenerys Targaryen, who is a woman herself and took a number of eunuchs into her army because they wouldn't rape, and Stannis Baratheon, who embodies Honor Before Reason), but they are the exception to the rule. Rape is, however, a crime outside of times of war, and rapists without the fortune of noble blood are shown as having a choice between castration and serving with the Night Watch. Highborn rapists go scot-free, though, and marital rape isn't even considered a crime. In the real Medieval world, though they had no concept of marital rape, taking your "conjugal rights" by force was seen as mistreating your wife, sometimes even as blasphemy against the sacrament of marriage. It could sometimes be grounds for a civil divorce (like other kinds of abuse), though it varied by region, being a matter of civil law rather than Church law.
  • Largely averted with the Ironborn, who have a general philosophy that Might Makes Right leads to a lot of Deliberate Values Dissonance (but then, none of them are particularly "heroic"). They consider murder and theft more honourable than trade, and the forcible kidnap of "salt wives" as the prerogative of any conqueror.
  • Jaime Lannister has a man beheaded after discovering that he's a rapist, much to the man's confusion as multiple people had raped the same woman.
• In the 1632 series, the armies the "uptimers" come across are frequently mercenary companies without regulation regarding rape (not that the downtimers consider it in the same light as their twenty-first-century neighbors), and the characters deal with the resultant complications.
• Kameron Hurley's "The Women of our Occupation" subverts this. The "invaders" in this story are women, conquering a patriarchal 1950s-style society. The main character gets pulled into an alleyway by one of them, who walked with him under the guise of bringing him home safe, and gets raped by her.
• Sword of Truth:
  • Every. single. bad guy is a rapist. For example, the books constantly point out that Jagang's (the villain) army is full of rapists. We couldn't even begin to guess how many times it's mentioned that some soldier or soldiers are/were raping women and children. The armies of the good guys, on the other hand, are super professional and would never rape anyone.
  • This is deliberately invoked by Richard once he becomes Lord Rahl. In the first book, it's mentioned that D'Haran soldiers practiced this, among other unsavory 'victory celebrations'. When Richard takes over, however, he puts an end to it, and actually gets some protest from his commanders saying that the soldiers have become accustomed to the, um, 'perks' of being a conquering army, and some of them aren't going to like losing them. Richard's response to this is along the lines of "Well, that's just too bad then."
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Tales of the Bounty Hunters has a short story about Leia in her metal bikini being shoved into Boba Fett's room for the night since Jabba wants to give his bounty hunter something extra. Fett gives her the bed, leans against the wall, and tells her that sex outside of marriage is immoral, what he's doing (pursuing bounties) is technically legal, he sees his relationship with Jabba as strictly business, and once the Rebellion is crushed, the Empire will likely deal with Jabba, but right now he's a lesser evil to them. He also opines that the Rebellion is morally wrong, and Han Solo is worse than he is because Solo smuggles spice. Yes, Boba Fett, working for Jabba the Hutt, the guy who Han was smuggling spice for, thinks he possesses the moral high ground, and Leia doesn't press it, maybe because she's got common sense. At any rate, he doesn't send her back because that would insult Jabba.
    Fett: I won't hurt you. I won't touch you. Sleep if you will. Or not; I don't care.
  • This isn't the only time Fett has acted this way. He usually isn't a cruel man; he's just completely uncaring of whoever he's hired to apprehend (and there's no real profit in hurting Leia, especially since she's already a prisoner). Later Expanded Universe stories turn him into an already-married man (and father) who is completely loyal to his (estranged) wife (this contradicts earlier text which states he's never even held a woman, let alone had sex with one).^note Turns into Fridge Brilliance with what is established later about Mandalorian culture. They're fanatically family-oriented, to the point where one of their nastiest insults translates to "unfit parent." If a Mando man rapes a woman, there's a chance he could father a child that he neglects to raise, which is unforgivable by their honor code.
• Used in Marco Polo to hammer home the villainy of the corrupt Mongol overseers of the southern provinces of China. When the title hero confronts them, they say that the women will grow to enjoy it and will love their new luxurious lifestyle. This is in stark contrast with the more chivalrous northern Mongols where the man is expected to patiently await the woman's approval or accept rejection without protest.
• Used in Juliet Marillier's Bridei Chronicles to highlight the virtues of the title character. He goes ballistic when he catches men from his own army about to rape captive women — despite the fact that a Pict in the 6th century probably wouldn't have such respect for women's rights. This actually makes perfect sense given that Bridei was raised by a druid to have great respect for the goddess; his childhood was extremely sheltered; he lives in a matrilineal society; and he has a younger foster sister whom he adores and who is about the same age as the girl about to be raped. Oh, and his best friend is involved.
• Dune plays with this a bit: it doesn't beat around the bush about how the armies of old raped the women of conquered lands (and still do) and trying to avoid this is why Leto II makes his armies all female. Considering the Honored Matres are descended from various Fish Speaker armies he made and the amount of (male) raping they do, it shows that line of thinking doesn't work. Much of what the Honored Matres do is as much control of their minions using their talents as an addictive drug ("do what we say if you want more of this") as actual rape-in-war. Many of their victims submit willingly in the first instance and then find themselves hooked. Internal reflections by several senior Bene Gesserit adepts show the Honored Matres' thinking as bound to lead to a horrific backlash for them sooner or later, and indeed they fear the possibility so much that when the Bene Gesserit finally do breed a man who can turn the tables on them in bed (to some degree-they end up addicted to each other), the Honored Matres blast Arrakis to a glowing cinder when they're made to believe he's there.
• Very noticeable in the Conqueror books. The Mongols were certainly fond of rape, and Genghis Khan did it so much that five per every thousand people living today have him as an ancestor. However, in the books, the Tartars are the only group known to actually commit rape.
• The protagonist of Typewriter in the Sky tries to enforce this trope on the pirates he commands but finds that they refuse to obey any orders on the subject. L. Ron Hubbard gives a fair bit of attention to what would actually happen during a pirate attack, as well as how the main character's modern morality estranges him from his crewmen. In-story, the resolution to the problem is through a Cosmic Retcon—the protagonist's the antagonist of the story-within-a-story, and the writer decides he's not evil enough and rewrites him straight into I Have You Now, My Pretty (much to his displeasure.)
• Conan the Barbarian:
  • Conan mentions in "The Vale of Lost Women" that he has never taken a woman by force. This may be due to Conan's inherent decency, but it may also be due to a formative incident in his teenage years in which he tried to rape a woman who turned out to be the daughter of Ymir the Frost Giant ("The Frost-Giant's Daughter"). That would probably put anyone off rape for the rest of their lives.
  • Well, Conan is a rogue who regularly kills, steals, etc. The main reason he is the hero of his stories is that his opponents are either Eldritch Abominations or are human beings with extremely vicious tendencies. Rape is one way of painting them as more villainous than Conan himself. Case in point Salome, the main villain from "A Witch Shall Be Born" (1934). She was born a princess of Khauran but at birth, she was recognized as the Evil Witch reborn, resulting in her own parents leaving her to die alone in the wilderness. She returns decades later to depose her twin sister Taramis of Khauran and replace her. So far so good, nothing unreasonable. But she then spends most of the story either arranging for various people to rape Taramis (starting with her first night on the throne: "Salome, hurrying along the corridor outside, smiled spitefully as a scream of despair and poignant agony rang shuddering through the palace.") or orchestrating orgies. Salome herself clearly enjoys the sex but the other women are unwilling participants: "She constantly indulges in the most infamous revelries, in which the unfortunate ladies of the court are forced to join, young married women as well as virgins." No other villain in the series seems as preoccupied with rape.
  • It should also be noted that Conan believed himself dreaming as he lay dying and did not believe that any of this was real at the time it was happening. Contributing to this belief was the moment when she dared him to attempt it.
  • On the other hand, a good number of them do rape — Conan rescues several Sex Slaves — and the armies are regarded as behaving predictably in the background.
• Completely averted in the Horseclans series, where the protagonist (notably, someone originally from modern America) of the first book is quite willing to have his men rape prisoners of war because they're "just Dirtmen." On the other hand, the victims had to be past puberty. Raping children would get a Clansman impaled on a short stake. This apparently made the Horseclans morally superior to the Ehlenes, who would rape just anybody.
• In one of The Witcher novels, an officer of an invading Nilfgardian army instructs his sergeants to restrain the soldiers from pillage, arsons, wanton slaughter of civilians, and rape, since they want to give the invasion a look of a liberation operation. One of the sergeants is then shown relating the order to his platoon: "No pillage, except for forage, no arsons, no murders, no fucking... well, no fucking unless you do it hush-hush and so nobody sees you."
• Subverted in the fifth book of The Black Company; after invading a new city, members of the company start raping Amazons. Croaker says they deserved it because they fought. Of course, the mercenaries are not exactly portrayed as pure of heart.
• In the Belisarius Series, it is an awful crime that only the most barbaric minions of the bad guys do. Worthy Opponents like the Rajputs and the Kushans do not engage in this, and though some Romans do, when Belisarius hears about it he simply hangs the perp. Or he calls for Valentinian.
• In Discworld, the Silver Horde of barbarian warriors do not rape. However, this may be because they're all over 80 and is possibly subverted somewhat when the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Historians distinguishes between rape and ravishment. "It's a question of style. There were never any actual complaints." While this is specifically referring to Cohen, and is probably true given that he's both improbably charismatic and pretty decent to non-combatants, it's implied that he's the exception rather than the rule. There is an exchange between Rincewind and Cohen in Interesting Times which suggests that the Silver Horde do not rape for more... practical reasons. Speaking about an 85-year-old Barbarian...
  Rincewind: Rape? That's not very....
  Cohen: He's an old man. Don't go spoiling his dreams.
• In King of the Middle-March by Kevin Crossley-Holland, the Christian armies in the Crusades are depicted as raping women in addition to other crimes, including both Muslims and the residents of a Byzantine city that the crusaders are used by their Venetian financial backer to besiege and ransack. The protagonist, a crusader (and a Child by Rape) is always horrified and intervenes when he can, and a tendency to treat women well is also used as a Pet the Dog trait for his Jerkass Big Brother Bully.
• Captain Corelli's Mandolin: Corelli catches an Italian soldier trying to rape a Greek girl. He makes the man stand in the sun for hours wearing nothing but a helmet and a haversack full of rocks.
• The Elenium: Subverted in the otherwise rather lighthearted Sparhawk series. The fierce Peloi Tribesmen of the Great Plains (Fantasy Counterpart Culture to the Mongols/Huns) are loudly and clearly in favor of the full Rape, Pillage, and Burn trinity, and are staunch allies to the heroes, the Knights of the Church... who are not only unsurprised but somewhat tolerant of the Peloi's predilections. During one memorable scene in the first trilogy, Sparhawk has to politely but firmly explain to their Peloi allies that there will be no rape, plundering, or burnination during the invasion of a particular city because it was one of their own cities that they were liberating from an occupying force. The implication being that if it was a foreign city, they'd mostly just stand aside and let the Tribesmen take what they wanted. The leader of the tribesmen is obviously depressed about this but agrees — with a sigh — since they're old friends. The same Peloi chieftain winds up being a fairly major character in the second trilogy... and, somewhat amusingly, winds up marrying one of the Atan people — who had previously murdered any number of would-be rapists during her stay in foreign lands. What she thought of his past hobbies remains unsaid.
• In the Heralds of Valdemar series, the Eastern Empire, despite being an antagonist, is like this. They have very strict laws about rape that get imposed whenever they conquer a new land. Basically, any woman that gets raped is granted the status of a divorced spouse, which means that half the perpetrator's possessions and wages go to the victim for five years if there is no child and sixteen if there is one. If the child is a daughter, the guy has to provide a dowry, and if it's a son, he has to pay for the outfitting when the son is conscripted into the military. If the perpetrator doesn't have the means to pay, then he gets sent to a government labor camp with his wages paying for it. If a guy is stupid enough to rape again, then he undergoes physical and magical punishment that leaves him outwardly intact but unable to repeat the act.
• In Sharpe, Sharpe is proud of being a "thief, pirate and murderer" but is very clear that he never commits rape. Nonetheless, the books quite frequently mention or show the soldiers from all armies committing rape. A besieged city that refuses to surrender is considered fair game for Rape, Pillage, and Burn once it's taken (this is all Truth in Television-it's only very recently that these became punishable as crimes).
• Played with in The Cinder Spires. When Albion Guardsman Bridget is trying to negotiate the end of a Mexican standoff between the Auroran marine Ciriaco, his soldiers, and her friends by allowing herself to be taken hostage, she believes she'll probably be 'raped and murdered'. Ciriaco sincerely tells her that if such a situation had played out, he would have gutted any man who tried to lay a hand on her. He assures her "[i]f it had to be death, I'd have given it to you quick and clean." Bridget is not comforted by this knowledge.
• The Song of Achilles: Achilles and Patroclus' warcamp during The Trojan War becomes something of a safe haven with Achilles, at Patroclus' urging, claiming as many of the female war captives as possible to protect them from being abused in the other camps. The fact that Achilles and Patroclus are an Official Couple with a major case of Single-Target Sexuality helps to convince Briseis, the first captive they claim, that she's safe with them.
• The main goal of the Cel legions from Dark Shores is to subdue a province as efficiently as possible, make the people see the benefits of joining the Empire, and get them to pay taxes. Raping the populace would not be conducive to that. Fortunately for the legionnaires, consorting with prostitutes is allowed, as long as they are paid.
• Averted in A Practical Guide to Evil: the legions of terror, official army of the Dread Empire of Praes and very much on the side of evil have very strict regulations against rape and perpetrators will be severely punished. This is in part due to the pragmatic villainy of the Dread Empress and the Black Knight, (they don't want the people of the country they just conquered to turn against them) but also due to their personal experiences. The trope still gets invoked when the Black Knight leads some of his troops into a rival country to wreak havoc: one of the local princes accuses the legions of plunder, arson, murder, and rape to get support for his bid to drive them out of his principality.
• The First Law:
  • When the Dogman takes the city of Uffrith with his men, he promises the population they will leave the women unbothered. A far cry from Bethod, who let his men rape the entire city for three days when he took it years before.
  • Averted in Best Served Cold: Monza promises the city of Caprile that they will be spared of the usual Rape, Pillage, and Burn. But her mistake was to entrust the city's safety to her brother, Benna, who was supposed to keep the mercenaries in check and got blackout drunk instead. You can guess what the mercenaries did.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • Heroes can steal, lie, and even murder their relatives: but Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil. Though the books never outright state that the villains commit rape during their pillaging, Word of God says they do.
  • This is most clearly demonstrated in The Children of Húrin, where Túrin is perfectly willing to steal from a dwarf whose child he just murdered but kills one of his own men to save a totally random girl from being raped. Though incestuous, Túrin's marriage to Nienor is entirely consensual and very happy (until they find out they are siblings).
  • Beren and Lúthien: Played with Celegorm, who contemplates raping Lúthien, but never gets the chance because Lúthien breaks out before he can make the attempt. Similarly, Morgoth attempts to rape Lúthien, but she slips out of his grasp before he can touch her, and tricks him into letting her perform a dance. Her magic dance puts Morgoth to sleep, and Lúthien is long gone when he awakens.

Live-Action TV

• In HBO's Rome, one of Titus Pullo's (one of the two main protagonists) first lines is something to the effect of how he lives to kill his enemies, take their gold, and enjoy their women. He's never shown actually enjoying an enemy's woman. He has bordellos for that.
  • Pullo does wind up bedding several slaves, who probably didn't have a lot of choice in the matter.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Deconstructed with Daenerys. When her husband's men crush a small village to take the populace as slaves, she tries to save the women of the defeated tribe from rape. Later one of those women gives Daenerys a What the Hell, Hero? speech for seeing herself as a hero for "saving" her when she had already lost everything and everyone she cared about at the hands of Daenerys' husband. Later, though aware of the measures and consequences of conquest, Dany still tries to counter the excess 'spoils' of war by acquiring eunuch warriors as the main core of her infantry, all of whom are incapable of rape. However, it is unlikely that Dany will ever be able to enforce this if she bands together a large myriad force of many cultures to march on Westeros. By the penultimate episode in the series, circumstances have led her to make a Face–Heel Turn and become a Fallen Heroine and when she finally attacks King's Landing, she no longer cares about enforcing this trope as her coalition army are free to rape and prey upon the innocent populace of the city.
  • Stannis decides to take Selyse and Shireen with him, given that many Watchers are convicted rapists. This is probably a nod to his book counterpart, who has rapists castrated.
• Sharpe: The eponymous hero will absolutely not tolerate rape, even — perhaps especially — by his own men. He has two enemy soldiers shot in front of their commander when he catches them at it, and almost hangs a member of his own unit who's caught with a girl, only relenting when the girl says it wasn't rape. Even then, he has the man taken behind a building and beaten for "making free" with her.
  • Sharpe's Siege's plot is reliant on the aversion of this trope. The British army is camped outside the French-occupied city of Badajoz, and Sharpe's wife — a spy for British-allied Portugal — is inside the city, along with their infant daughter. Much of the plot, therefore, relies on his need to find and protect his family from his own army ransacking the city.
• In an episode of the French comedy show Kaamelott, the daughter of a Celt chieftain tells King Arthur — who just conquered her village — that according to Celtic law, he must now rape her to confirm his victory. She seems utterly disappointed when he refuses (as she traded place with her sister for it) and threatens Arthur at knifepoint for it until she settles for being one of his mistresses.

Mythology and Religion

• In the Book of Exodus, there is a provision for a soldier who finds himself attracted to a (non-Canaanite) woman whose village he's just destroyed. He is to leave her alone until the war is over, after which time, if he is still attracted to her, he can shave her head and trim her nails (signs of mourning in that time and place), take away her clothing (replacing it with something else), and give her a month to mourn her parents and culture. After that, he is permitted to take her as a wife or a concubine. And should he then decide he doesn't want her anymore, he is to let her go free and is not allowed to sell her into slavery. The waiting period appears to have been put into place to discourage war rape (although it did still happen) and to make the soldier cool down and consider if this woman was really worth all that trouble, if he really wanted to marry her or if he was just horny.
  • Also, more broadly, soldiers were not allowed to have any kind of sex if they were actively fighting in a war, most likely in an effort to keep diseases (that could potentially wipe out their army, or their society as a whole if they brought said diseases home to their wives) at bay. (However, needless to say, this didn't always happen in practice.) This becomes a major plot point during King David's Uriah Gambit in the Books of Kings.

Video Games

• Almost averted in Dragon Age: Origins. This being Dragon Age, the number of true allies with whom your women are safe is quite small, to say the least. In the City Elf origin, all the women in your family, and you (if female), are dragged off by human nobles to be raped. A few NPCs allude to this fate when talking about war and banditry in Thedas. There are quite a few female NPCs with Rape as Backstory. And, just in case you thought you were safe fighting inhuman, nonsentient beasts who don't seem to reproduce normally, the women who are taken away by the Darkspawn are mutated into Broodmothers and forced to give birth to new Darkspawn. Yes, women are safe with the few actual heroes in this world (even the oversexed Zevran will be very, very sure you're into him before he'll make a move), but this seems to be a fact about these particular characters as people and does not automatically apply to anyone on their sides, ever.
  • Considering that it seems ALL Elves who aren't the Dalish are poor as dirt, it is unlikely there would be any form of protection along those lines.

Webcomics

• Nodwick: A somewhat-outnumbered human army is standing against an Orcish Horde when the protagonists bring in a small army of mercenaries to help the beleaguered humans... unfortunately, the mercenaries are... well, mercenaries, and it soon turns into a bidding war between the human forces and the orcs. Finally, the Orcs offer the mercenaries a fat percentage of the looting, "And your pick of the women!" to which the mercenaries respond with a resounding "SOLD!" But of course, Nodwick manages to turn things around in his usual, understated fashion, by playing the virtues of the Stupid Good poster-child, Piffany, against the mercenaries' ruthlessness. Realizing that if they sell out to the orcs, it'll make her cry, they turn on the orcs with unbridled fury...
• Averted in the world of Drowtales, which is a Crapsack World with Grey-and-Gray Morality, and shows that even in a society where the political and war leaders are women this can still happen with it apparently being more about power than the genders of the perpetrators and/or victims. Quain'tana's daughter Mel'arnach was repeatedly abused by her mother's men and at one point Quain'tana herself ordered it to try and conceive an heir through Mel and Vaelia, the only human in the main cast, says that this is true of the human armies in the world as well.
• Played straight in Far to the North. When one of the slavers tries to get grabby with the sister-in-law of the female protagonist, their leader has the gang's Heroic Bastard knock the man out while severely lecturing the others in his band.

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