Date of Award

4-19-2017

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD)

Department

Law

First Advisor

Kit Kinports

Abstract

Rape is a crime globally condemned, yet it's one of the most controversial crimes at the time. What this research did was to gather the information of countries' rape laws in their penal codes from all over the world and create a pattern of how countries on a global scale criminalize rape and how far they have changed in the past century. The goal was to produce a rape criminalization map of the world to show which elements are playing the main factors and which factors are missing, how close countries define rape and how different their reactions are.

The method that was adopted was the principal components analysis. This system allowed the researcher to compare twenty-nine countries plus seven of the US states based on fifty-one elements of the crime of rape.

The outcome was the production of seven charts, fourteen figures, eight dendograms and seven maps to establish three facts: the closer countries are, the more similarly define rape. The more mutual colonial history they share, the closer their definition of rape is to each other and analyzing the evolution of rape law throughout the history showed countries' rape laws re getting closer to the elements of Human Rights regarding sex crimes and human dignity.

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