A rape is indeed a horrific thing to go through. If someone gets raped in the park in the evening (which is a small fraction of all rapes), the main problem is not that their walk was interrupted, nor is it that they got punched or strangled.

The main problem is them laying there, with someone having an unwanted intercourse with them. Whatever lead to that might be very bad as well, but in that moment it is irrelevant. The bad thing is being in intercourse against your will.

Being in that situation always feels the same amount of horrible. If no active violence was used but a credible threat was, it still feels just as bad.

And: if they were pressured into consenting, they will be aware throughout the intercourse that they are in it not because they wanted to, but because they had to. A person pressured into an intercourse and laying there, thinking that they did not want this intercourse, has the same horrible feeling during the act.

What happened before the physical part is not really relevant. What’s relevant is that if a person has the experience that they are in a sexual intercourse without wanting it, they get the full psychological consequences of having been raped.

And yes, you cannot trust a consent given through pressuring.

If you have gotten consent from women by pressuring them into giving that, then they have probably stayed quiet about it, but you have indeed given them the experience of being in an intercourse against their will.

Yeah, of course it’s even worse if also violence was used, but then it’s just the effects of having been raped plus the effects of having been a victim of violence. The part about having been raped is the same.

So, to recap the definition of rape: If a person feels that they are in an intercourse against their will, they will get the psychological consequences of having been raped, and are, in other words, being raped.