This chapter examines the Chinese controversy over “Jeep girls,” referring to women who socialized, sometimes intimately, with American soldiers during and after World War II. While conservatives maligned “Jeep girls” out of racial and sexual anxieties, liberals and self-identified Jeep girls invoked the language of modernity and patriotism. However, in the wake of the Peking Rape incident in 1946, the once diverse debate quickly ended as nationwide protests raged against American imperialism. Delving into various archives and periodicals from both countries, this research uncovers the complexities of Chinese women’s experiences and their stories, which have been muffled or filtered through patriarchal agendas.

A great deal of figurative decoration on Greek painted pottery relates to mythology. But what made particular painters choose to paint particular scenes at particular times? This chapter assembles the evidence for what was painted on Athenian painted pottery from the seventh to the fourth century, showing how different scenes peaked in popularity at different periods, and how although some scenes were perennial favourites, others attracted interest only briefly. The chapter then explores the implications of the patterns both for changing degrees of engagement with one particular set of texts, the Homeric epics, and for the way in which changing values affected the myths, and the literary instantiations of those myths, that were in vogue at any one time. While the questions of what it is to be human, how men relate to women, and how to behave at a party are of lasting interest to users of pottery, engaging with issues of divine power is popular in the sixth century, with issues of sexual relations and extreme situations arising from war popular around 500, and issues about decision-making as popular in the fifth century.

Chapter 5 focuses on cases in which States have restricted the activities of individuals or communities due to concerns about religiously motivated harm. Firstly, it explores cases concerning sexual relations with minors, corporal punishment of children, compulsory vaccination refusal, and ceremonial use of illegal substances. These are the kinds of cases one would expect fall into the outermost circle in the loose concentric circles model, where there is weakest forum internum relevance and strongest countervailing factors and, thus a very low degree of forum internum protection. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the ECtHR’s approach in such cases is as expected. Secondly, through an analysis of cases concerning allegations of threats to national security, challenges to rights and freedoms of members, and transgressions of health and safety laws, this chapter also aims to show that where the ECtHR considers the harm in question is not substantiated, or State actions are disproportionate, the ECtHR can, and does, give greater weight to forum internum relevance than to countervailing factors, and offer a higher degree of protection.

Chapter Four revisits the controversial issue of sexual assault of female sent-down youth. Archival records make it clear that the compilation of statistics and the investigation of sexual misconduct were part of a campaign triggered by a state directive in 1973 concerning “harm to sent-down youth,” a campaign that pressured local officials to identify, expose, and investigate locals who had romantic relations with female sent-down youth, and punish individuals found guilty of sexual assault. This was not limited to rape, but included a range of behaviors and relationships previously deemed inappropriate and now classified as criminal: seduction, adultery, and molestation as well as flirting, dating, and affairs. Regardless of what type of intimacy was the basis of accusation and investigation, in almost every case individuals found to be guilty perpetrators of abuse were local men, and those they abused were urban women. Male sent-down youth who engaged in similar intimacies with fellow sent-down youth or local women were exempted from the investigations, as were local men who engaged in such intimacies with rural women.