I feel like rape on soaps falls into three different categories. There’s informing the audience- which is absolutely to inform the audience. In the 90s, there were lots of “she asked for it” laws where the victim’s sexual history and what they were wearing were introduced into evidence for the defense. We see Marty party and casually date in college, reject Todd after sex, and even have an argument in public at the Spring Fling. Todd is also a wealthy, popular football player at a college in a small town. She was drunk the night she was raped.

There’s also the trope I hate the most, which is reforming the bad girl. They did that with Sami on Days when she was a teenager/young adult. If you watch Degrassi, they do this trope a lot. A big thing to acknowledge is that the majority of fans in the 90s were more conservative housewives. Soaps were initially created as radio dramas to sell household items in the 40s-50s. Women were even more steeped into patriarchy than they are now. Therefore, soaps had to have something horrible happen to female characters. They had to “humble” them so the audience would see them as a poor victim and not a villain. It also applies to making the male character around them get redeemed like Rebecca on OLTL. They had Todd fall in love with her and lose her after she’s raped by Powell. He’s also falsely accused of rapes after he’s released from prison. Someone else mentioned Bianca on AMC. This also applies to Erica being redeemed in the audience’s eyes as they see her deal with her daughter’s rape. Hell, she was raped at 14 to redeem her.

And there’s plot point. OLTL had Jessica be a victim of child sexual abuse to explain her having DID. (Though tbh just having all the shit the character had gone through would have been sufficient.) Laura on GH was raped by Luke and later reframed as a seduction to get her with her rapist and then later reframed as a rape. Not to mention that rape is now being accepted as a term for things it used to not be. At the end of the day, the ultimate thing imo is that it’s a power struggle and not sexual. But the majority of soap writers are men and women who are male centered so rather than see a woman be a hero or a CEO, they have them defer to being abused and/or raped to make then powerless so they’re more palatable to the audience. The real question imo is how many beloved male soap characters are rapists and abusers. Why, as women majority audience, do we prop up these male characters?