Franca Viola

Franca Viola is an Italian woman who became famous in the 1960s in Italy for refusing a "rehabilitating marriage" to her rapist after being kidnapped, held hostage for more than a week, and raped numerous times. She is considered to be the first Italian woman who had been raped to publicly refuse to marry her rapist. Instead, she and her family successfully pursued prosecution of the rapist. The trial had a wide resonance in Italy, as Viola's behavior clashed with traditional social conventions in Southern Italy, whereby a woman would lose her honour if she did not marry the man to whom she had lost her virginity. Franca Viola became a symbol of the cultural progress and emancipation of women in post-war Italy.