This month's topic for my folklore translations is "villainous nobles", and next Monday's tales feature two rapists (and these are just two examples of many). This got me thinking of how sexual violence is dealt with in German folk tales.

Yes, the folk tales condemn rape as something very evil. However, they also reinforce the social consequences for the victim. Women who were raped are implied to be "ruined", and it is portrayed in a positive manner when a woman chooses death rather than submitting to rape (such as throwing herself off a cliff), even though suicide is otherwise portrayed as one of the greatest of sins.

And this portrayal of the social consequences is one of the things that bothers me, since there is aways an implication that a woman who is raped is partially at fault, since they _could_ have chosen death instead (like the alleged "positive examples" of women in folk tales who do just that). This is victim-blaming, and makes the situation worse for them.

Such narratives persist into the modern day, of course, where too many women who were raped are blamed for allegedly putting themselves into the situation where they were raped, instead of putting the focus on the choice their attackers made to assault them.

And now I wonder if there are any cultures where the folk tales deal with this topic in a different consequences - where they don't imply any social consequences for the victim, but focus on blaming the attacker for his choice instead.