@JBStillFlying : The anecdote I was belittling was the anecdote about a professor at Harvard being asked not to use the word “violate” in his class, as in “that conduct violated the law.” That was not a request that needed to be taken seriously. I did not mean to suggest that there would be no meaningful issues teaching the law of rape to a class that contained one or more rape victims.
Honestly, my first-year criminal law class, in 1978, barely touched on the law of rape. It was taught by a right-wing professor who loved provoking liberal students, but he didn’t go there. Nor did he give any indication that he was refraining from going there out of concern for possible victims in his class – he just never went there. First-year criminal law was not a comprehensive survey of crimes; it was the study of the analytical methods and common concepts that pervade criminal law
I did study some rape law, briefly, in a third-year seminar on sex discrimination taught by a leading feminist legal scholar. As far as I know, no one at the time questioned whether it was appropriate to discuss rape. (In the professor’s definition, “rape” probably covered substantially all heterosexual sexual activity, which likely ensured that all of the women in the class, including the lesbians, qualified as victims/survivors.) The teacher was very tough and a serious martial arts student who was inordinately proud of her “karate punch that can kill,” so students might have hesitated to show weakness like that.