Rape is used to describe how barbaric the Azad Empire are as a society throughout the book. There are a few mentions of it but no explicit scenes of rape or sexual assault. At one point the main character Gurgeh is at a club with two women, one of them is dragged away by her abusive ex partner. He finds her in a room with her ex who is verbally berating her and pushing her around, then the ex leaves. The women try to convince Gurgeh to have sex with them. This all turned out to be a ploy to film Gurgeh having sex, but he does not do it and escapes. There is a point where a drone is showing Gurgeh the horrors of the Empire society, in which shows him encrypted TV channels reserved to be viewed by higher class people in the society. The TV channels are at various levels, becoming more horrible as the levels increase, the descriptions of level 2 and 3 are especially graphic. The TV shows torture and rape of women, children and men. This is used to emphasise how barbaric the society is. The main character is repulsed by what he has seen. In one of his games, Gurgeh's opponent places a bet where the losers genitals and reproductive organs will be surgically removed. The opponent ends up having that happen to them, and most likely commits suicide as a result. Gurgeh describes one of his games as a 'mutual rape' but this is just in passing and the game does not include any sexual nature.