It may be true in games but it doesn't seem to be so in anime.
Though I would dispute the latter, I should think that when I'm posting in a thread about video games, providing examples from video games, it should be tolerably obvious that I am indeed talking about video games.
It is by no means feminist to depict strong women as needing to be rape victims. Certainly rape is a social problem that needs to be addressed, but limiting every strong woman to a archetype of rape victim is offensive.
It doesn't really spring from a desire to address rape as a social problem at all. Rather the opposite, in fact - there are a couple of particular entrenched aspects of mainstream media culture that contribute to the rape-and-daddy-issues thing, both of them explicitly counter-feminist:
1. The perception that "proper" women aren't supposed to be strong or assertive still has a lot of currency, especially among the old-boys' club that is mainstream video game publishing culture. Thus, if a female character is proactive, she
must have something wrong with her; she's gotta be emotionally damaged in some fashion, or else she wouldn't act like that. From a characterisation perspective, making her a rape survivor is an easy, low-commitment solution - it can readily be slotted into just about any broader backstory without significant disruption.
2. In action-oriented popular media (of which video games are typically a subset), the default protagonist presumed to be male. If I described a video game to you without specifying the gender of the protagonist, you'd probably assume it was a dude as a matter of course - and you'd generally be right. This extends to the point that female characters are basically obliged to justify their being female; when a lot of publishers look at a female protagonist, the first question they're going to ask is: "Why isn't she a man? Can you make her a man?" There needs to be a specific
reason for her to be female - you can't have a female protagonist "just because". The easiest way to furnish such a justification is to give the protagonist a backstory that revolves around "women's issues", whatever that means.
(The latter is, of course, by no means restricted to gender. You tend to see a similar phenomenon involving non-white protagonists in Western games, and particularly involving black protagonists; if a game's protagonist is black, you can be virtually guaranteed that his characterisation and motivations will be About Race in some conspicuous fashion. Without the race angle, there's no justification for him not being white. And I say "him" quite deliberately - when was the last time you saw black female protagonist in a mainstream game?)
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