There are old folk tales about women who turn into swans or into seals. If you steal their animal skin while they're bathing, you can trap them and make them do what you want--until they find the skin, that is. Then they'll fly or swim away, never to be seen again.

There's no way to prove it, but I assume these folk tales are about a situation like this. A woman gets assaulted while bathing, her assailant now owns her, and she lives with him and bears his children for a few or a lot of years, until one day she "finds her skin" and leaves. Either she runs off to a distant village, goes with another man, goes to a relative, does away with herself, or just wanders off into the forest or the sea. Or maybe the guy kills her, either through murder or negligence. This must have happened many, many times before. The selkie story is a way to tell kids what happened in a way they'll understand.

What a brave woman! I’m so inspired by her courage.

There is an Italian novel about this, but not about her in particular. I wish I remembered the title but I believe the story involved a woman who leaves her rapist husband and the son she bore with him to live in exile? I might be getting the details wrong because I had to read it for college a long time ago.

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Imagine if such an equivalent for males existed. Imagine a society where man could sodomize another man and then take ownership of his victim as the victim was now considered spoiled.

What other crime do we stigmatize the victim and further traumatize them than the sexual assault of women?