Raptio

Raptio (in archaic or literary English rendered as rape) is a Latin term for, among several other meanings for senses of "taking", the large-scale abduction of women: kidnapping for marriage, concubinage or sexual slavery.

The word is akin to rapine, rapture, raptor, rapacious and ravish, and referred to the more general violations, such as looting, destruction, and capture of citizens, that are inflicted upon a town or country during war, e.g. the Rape of Nanking.

An excavation of the Neolithic Linear Pottery culture site at Asparn-Schletz, Austria, revealed the remains of numerous slain victims.

[1] Investigation of the Neolithic skeletons found in the Talheim Death Pit suggests that prehistoric men from neighboring tribes were prepared to fight and kill each other to capture and secure women.

According to Livy he spoke to them each in person, "and pointed out to them that it was all owing to the pride of their parents in denying right of intermarriage to their neighbours.

They would live in honourable wedlock, and share all their property and civil rights, and—dearest of all to human nature—would be the mothers of free men.

The conflict was eventually resolved when the women, who now had children by their Roman husbands, intervened in a battle to reconcile the warring parties.

Mutual abduction of women between Christian and Muslim communities was common in the Balkans under Ottoman rule, and is a frequent theme in the Hajduk songs of the period.

[6] Yanoama is a biography of Helena Valero, a mixed-race mestizo woman[7][8] who was captured in the 1930s as a girl by the Yanomami, an indigenous tribe living in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil.