Best Answer
Sexual assault is a serious problem, but has not always been treated as such by the legal community. In fact, throughout much of history, rape and other forms of sexual assault were not really treated like crimes. Once they were criminalized, they were treated much more like property times than crimes against the person. What makes this more difficult to understand is that they were not even treated like property crimes committed against the victim, but against a male in the victim’s life, such as a father or husband. Sexual assault victims were often legally required to accept punishment, as a victim, whether by being forced to marry their assailant or even being treated as an adulterer which could include penalties up to and including execution.
Today’s rape laws are much more victim-friendly, but are still imperfect. This leads to multiple possible ways to approach the body paragraphs in an essay discussing rape laws. Part of how you tailor the approach may depend upon how narrowly you are focusing on the topic.
For example, if you want to look at the evolution of rape laws in the United States, you could break down your paragraphs into time periods and examine what rape laws were like during chunks of those times in each paragraph. Spousal rape laws would provide an interesting topic because there were no spousal rape laws for most of the country’s history, then states started to get rid of spousal exceptions, but there are two states that still have some form of spousal exception.
You could compare different types of rape statutes. In the US, rape can be based on either the lack of consent or the lack of ability to consent. The second category is known as statutory rape and usually refers to crimes against children, but may include other protected classes. You could break down your body paragraphs into explanations of the different types of sexual assault offenses.
