Rape has a muddled history, because it has often been considered to be an ‘unmentionable’ crime in the Puritanical sense, kept hidden by victims and society¹

Much of the history of rape is derived from the history of laws and their application. This is, as Sanders explains,² because most of the documentation of rape has been in the form of written laws or records, and the case of Vietnam is no exception to this rule.

Starting with the assumption that rape law is designed around a traditional sexuality that is based on the conceptualization of male aggression and female submission, in this article, I shall examine how Vietnamese society has been viewing rape and how people have reacted to rape at different periods of history. One of the sources used in this article is Ta Van Tai’s book The Vietnamese Tradition of Human Rights.³ This work constitutes an excellent account and interpretation of traditional laws including rape laws throughout Vietnamese history. Absent from this study, however, is an examination of gender perspectives with respect to rape-related legislature. The current article attempts to fill in the gap concerning how gender is constructed in the context of these laws.