Clearly further research is needed to validate these extraordinary claims. Starks and Blackie base their inferences on an evolutionary interpretation of divorce and remarriage records, which by themselves say nothing about rape. Neither can this data shed light on the tendency, if any, for husbands or wives to seek extramarital liaisons. The researchers play down the possibility that rape, as a pathology of society, could serve purposes other than insemination. Rapists attack children and elderly people, of both sexes, as well as women of child-bearing age.
Rape can and has been used as a weapon of war and ethnic subjugation.
To propose that it serves some evolutionary function is distasteful and unnecessary. The spandrels of San Marco and the panglossian paradigm.