How common was rape and child sex in Europe during the Middle Ages?
In a discussion regarding George R.R. Martin's work, the dubious claim was made that the seemingly excessive and gratuitous rape scenes were to paint a historically accurate picture of medieval times.
Was the average woman or child at great risk of rape?
Would this change during times of war?
For women and children captured after battle?
Were women and children at great risk of being captured after battle?
I have some earlier answers that relate to sexual violence in the Middle Ages. Additional ones are pasted as a reply to this post.
[1/2]
Well, every time a woman asks a friend to watch her drink while she's in the bathroom or takes a 6-session self-defense class, she's acting like every man is a potential rapist.^1 But in general, the "Schrödinger's Rapist" concept applied to the modern world turns on the idea that in a culture where coercive intercourse and other nonconsensual sexual acts are normatively forbidden in all cases, some people, overwhelmingly men, choose to break those norms and rape.
For medieval western Europe (the primary context for my answer), then, the question we need to ask isn't "were individual men more evil or less evil than today." It's: were there circumstances under which it was a cultural norm--even expectation--for men to rape? And the answer is categorically yes. I will look at four cases in particular: rape as a war crime, statutory rape, spousal rape, and rape of enslaved women.
Sexual violence in warfare
For women faced with an invading army or with a "friendly" army passing through town, or women travelling with an army (as support for their husbands or on pilgrimage with crusaders and so forth), rape was not a possibility. It was an expectation. For soldiers victorious in battle, the chance to rape was not a possibility; it was payment.
To borrow from an earlier answer for a spell:
In a town or fortification facing a siege, women and children were typically given a choice: flee or stay. Many (most?) chose to stay and help defend their town--we know women were crucial in building and repairing fortifications, and running weapons and provisions to men guarding the walls. (In addition to women who fought directly, like the famous Gesche Meiburg).
But if the town or castle fell, it would be subject to plunder by the enemy soldiers: the seizure of wealth in the churches and monasteries, the execution of men who'd been fighting, the rape and probable execution of the women who stayed. With apologies for straying into early modern, when Protestants captured the town of Pamiers during the French wars of religion, they broke into Catholic families' houses and raped the women they found. The soldiers threw rocks at women and children who fled, trying to stop them.
During the siege of Liege in 1211, Jacques de Vitry wrote, the city's religious women threw themselves into the river and into the sewers, preferring to risk suicide by drowning (which in medieval theology, meant damnation) to the certainty of being raped. Now, Jacques was making a point about the value of chastity (and in fact, he happily adds that all the women miraculously survived). But whether or not his example was factual, it made sense and had power as a lesson with his audience precisely because they also understood rape would have been a guarantee in that situation.
Plunder was considered the soldiers' right, and this extended to women's bodies. (The seizing of loot in warfare was banned in the late 19th century; rape was not outlawed as a war crime until after World War II.) Peter Hagendorf of Bavaria, a rare example of a literate soldier in the earliest modern era, noted in his meticulous diary:
I took a young girl with me from Pforzheim, too, but I let her go back in again. I was sorry about this because at the time I had no wife.
But women outside towns and castles under siege might not fare any better. Villagers forced to house higher-ranking soldiers could well find the nobles demanding sex from their daughters. And those women who did choose to leave towns under siege would, of course, be without protection amidst an enemy army. Women following behind an army in motion (in the 'baggage train') might still fall victim to murder and rape if the opposing soldiers chose to attack them while undefended.
Sexual violence was the assumed result of women on the losing side in warfare. But at the same time it was a norm and an expectation, there was a consciousness it was also wrong. Robert of Rheims' has Pope Urban's call for crusade say, "What can I say about the evil rape of women [by Muslims], of which it is worse to speak than to be silent?"
...which is to say, it was wrong when those people did it. Not when your own side did it, of course.
Slavery
It wasn't just rape in warfare that was a cultural norm, but rape after many cases of warfare. This was one way that medieval women might find themselves enslaved. And sexual slavery during at least part of their life, we know, was the widespread experience of enslaved women. In Europe, this primarily meant in Spain, Italy, and their eastern colonies. The market prices of various demographics of enslaved people being sold make that much clear--Rebecca Winer, David Nirenberg, and John Boswell have even talked about the "feminization" of Mediterranean slavery.
Winer, Guy Romestan, and a handful of others have described for various territories the practice of (sometimes) raping and impregnating slave women, and (frequently) forcing them to give up their children to orphanages in order to nurse their owner's child. Records of slave sales will explicitly mention, and give a higher value to, women who have a history of breastfeeding successfully. Sally McKee studied the reverse for Italy and Crete: situations where enslaved women did not have to give up the children they had with their male owners (but while the owners may have treated the children as free, the mother did not receive the same benefit.)
In warfare, it's even more explicit. From the same answer as above:
We can see it in references to sparing exclusively the young women for slaves (Guibert of Nogent), or the references to captured slave girls (Ibn al-Athir). Albert of Aachen, a chronicler of the First Crusade era, explicitly claims that the Arab soldiers capture and enslave virgins. (According to him, the Christians just kill everyone.) Albert's writing makes it clear that he believes rape is the intention: "They took away only young virgins and nuns, whose faces and figures seemed pleasing to their eyes, and beardless and attractive [male] youths."
For women who found themselves in slavery in western medieval Europe, rape was the expectation and their reality. For male slave owners, this was an accepted and standard practice.
Follow up question: Much of the answers here relate to Western Europe or the Middle East. Can anyone speak to the same topic from other parts of the world?