SEDUCTION. - In biblical language the term has various meanings. Sometimes it denotes any action directed at inducing others to error or to sin: in this sense the devil is often called the "seducer," and his work of inducing to evil, especially at the end of time, is precisely qualified as seduction (cf. II Thess. 2:10; II John 7, etc.). In particular, the action of inducing to idolatry (cf. Deut. 7:4) and to impurity (cf. Prov. 5:20; cf. also Gen. 34:1-31; II Sam. 13) is called seduction.
The Old Testament deals with seduction in the last-mentioned sense in Ex. 22:16 ff. and Deut. 22:23 ff. In the first passage it is said that "if a man seduces a virgin who is not yet betrothed, he shall endow her and marry her; if the father of the girl refuses to give her to him, he shall pay a sum of money according to the dowry that virgins customarily receive." In the second it is said that in the case of the seduction of a betrothed virgin, occurring in a city, she and the seducer "shall be stoned: the girl because she did not cry out... the man because he has humiliated his neighbor's wife." If this happens in the countryside and with the use of violence, "the girl shall suffer nothing." Only the death penalty for the seducer shall remain. If, moreover, the girl violated under such conditions is not betrothed, the seducer "shall give the girl's father fifty shekels of silver and shall have her as his wife, because he has humiliated her, and he may not divorce her for the whole time of his life." As can be seen, a distinction is always made between a betrothed and an unbetrothed virgin, between city and countryside, and there is never lacking a reference to force and therefore to violence. When it comes to marriage, the possibility of divorce is excluded.
The prescriptions of the Old Testament notably influenced canonical legislation, which required that the seducer of a virgin, besides taking her as his bride, should also establish a dowry for her, being restricted to the sole duty of endowing her when she or her father did not consent to the marriage (I, X, 5, 16). Practice, however, increasingly moved toward a disjunctive interpretation: either marry the young woman or provide her with a dowry: "hodie contra stuprantes virgines sine vi, non est in usu alia poena, quam ut illas ducant in uxores, vel condecenter dotent" (I. Clarus, Practica criminalis de stup., n. 3, in Opera omnia, II, Venice 1614). Yet such provisions sometimes turned out to be, more than a restraint, an incentive to seduction: girls and parents saw in them the way to obtain the dowry or to arrive at marriage. For this reason some legislators established that the defiler be condemned to a penalty to be devoted to the benefit of the poor. Some even went so far as to remove any penalty and indeed the action itself.
Current Italian legislation recognizes the crime of seduction "when there has been carnal conjunction" (art. 526 of the Italian Penal Code) and establishes that "whoever, by promise of marriage, seduces a woman who is a minor, inducing her into error about his own status as a married person, is punished with imprisonment from three months to two years"; the promise alone, therefore, is not a crime; for this to exist, the woman must be a minor and there must have been deception about one's status as a married person; there is therefore no crime when the woman is of age and when the seducer is unmarried.
Current canonical legislation does not contemplate a crime of seduction in the specific sense of Exodus and Deuteronomy and of the Italian Penal Code. Something akin is provided for in canons 2353 and 2354, in which, however, the aspect of violence and abduction is above all emphasized. Often, however, the CIC deals with crimes that in a broader sense could be called seduction: particularly worthy of mention are canon 904 concerning the solicitation ad turpia carried out by a priest confessor (v. SOLICITATION) and canon 2359, concerning violations of chastity committed by clerics.
From the moral point of view, moreover, seduction is gravely reproved both for the sin that the seducer intends to commit and for that to which he induces the person he wishes to seduce and, sometimes, for the means by which he seeks to arrive at the seduction; it therefore accumulates in itself the offense against the virtue to which the object of the seduction is opposed and the offense against love of neighbor, whose good one must seek to procure even at one's own sacrifice.
Given the configuration of the sin, seduction also entails the obligation of reparation. For this to truly exist, however, there must actually have been a harm; in practice, there must have been an obstacle to marriage or conception or birth. A point that has long drawn attention and that still today divides authors is whether the reparation must take place through marriage. In this regard it is observed, and not unjustly, that marriage, especially in the current marital and family structure, entails a notable concurrence of outlook and way of life; when this is lacking, rather than a good it becomes an evil and a loss; in such a case, adding marriage to the seduction would mean adding to one evil another more serious one.
Pastorally, therefore, there will be need at one and the same time for caution and realism, avoiding hasty, simplistic and sentimental solutions. It goes without saying, from the pastoral point of view, that no little prudence will be needed before pronouncing on the existence of the seduction and on its perpetrator.
For the meaning of seduction taken in the sense of temptation, v. TEMPTATION OF MAN.
Bibliography4 works
Giovanni Battista Guzzetti