What is to prevent the victim from dropping off the infant, once born, into the nearest field to die?

Religion?

In some cases the rapist himself and /or his gang / tribe?

A patriachial cultural context where women’s bodies are seen as male property and they not allowed to control what happens to them? 🙁

Lots of rapists are *seriously* religious in a religion that deems sex immoral. Therefore, since this person is getting a buzz, it must be the victim’s fault, ergo THEIR (the victim’s) lust.

It also gets easier to justify in a religion that has Original Sin: if all humans are basically wicked, then it’s not your fault, you just backslided for a bit and maybe being EXTRA virtuous for a week will even it out.

Uh oh.

[anthropological rant]

Ah… when I read a sentence like this, many bells go off, such as the use of the word “primitive” (I promise you it has a rich meaning that simply does not apply in this case at all no matter what you happen to think it means) and the term “tribal society” .. that’s a little like saying “Well, we’ve got your raccoons, and we’ve got non-raccoon members of the order of Carnivores, and the raccoons are one thing and the carnivores are this other thing” … Then there’s the fact that non-Western societies, being very very diverse, have very very different patterns of rape, and I’m sure you will find many such societies where rape is rare or virtually does not happen.

There are three very famous social settings where rape of one form or another occurs more often than many other societies. 1) Lots of variation in economic disparity, women’s power, etc. in the context where individuals (men or women) are very often alone. That would be rural and urban areas in the US; 2) Western armies in combat settings; and 3) that whole period of time from the “rise of civ” through the “dark ages” and the middle ages and so on, including the prior lat Bronze Age and Iron Age, in Europe. I mean, really, Vikings were more typical than not.

I’ve listed these three in ascending order of liklihood that a woman will at some time in her life be raped, and we can probably reverse 2 and 3 locally for prolonged occupation or if we want to ask a slightly different question: Chance of cause of death being linked to rape.

None of that is about “tribal” or “primitive” … I lived for years in “tribal primitive” societies and the only rape that happened was by westernized people, such as regular army soldiers. There is virtually no rape among Pygmies and almot no rape among the horticultural villagers I lived with in two totally different regions of Central Africa.

[/ anthropological rant]

The study done on the effect of female tears on the arousal of males was done with fairly nomral male humans I imagine.
A rapist could hardly be categorized as a ‘fairly normal male’, and would be unlikely to be influenced by the faint chemicals in the tears of the victim…

The key word is normal. Rape, in our society, is normally a solitary situation committed by someone who is decidedly not normal. In a more primitive situation, namely in a tribal society, occasions of rape may have been more communal situation, as in to the victor go the spoils in the case of tribal warfare. In that situation, tears may have had some effect on some the winners. Did all of the Serb soldiers commit rape in Bosnia and Kosovo?