raping

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of rape.

   Members of the militia were prosecuted for raping civilians during the war.

   Raping prisoners is forbidden under international humanitarian law.

   Note

   The -ing form serves two jobs. It is the progressive participle (soldiers were raping civilians) and the gerund, which still takes a direct object like any verb (raping prisoners). It carries every sense of rape, including the older ones of seizing, abducting and plundering. It also carries slang uses meaning 'to trounce' or 'to treat unfairly', which are offensive and best avoided. Once it stands without an object and names the act itself, it has become the noun.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act or crime of forcing sexual intercourse on a person against their will.

   The tribunal documented the systematic raping of the town's inhabitants.

   Survivors testified to months of raping in the detention camps.

   Note

   Unlike many -ing nouns, it counts. Its plural, rapings, is used where writers tally separate acts in accounts of mass violence. Kelly Dawn Askin's War Crimes Against Women (1997) speaks of 'these rapings' in a city under assault, and Edmond C. Gruss's The Four Presidents of the Watch Tower Society (2003) reports 'the rapings of more than one thousand' women. As a mass noun it names the act in general, meaning the same as rape.

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