震災で家族を亡くしたOtoyaは、売られた奉公先で暴行されそうになったところを、家の跡取りである一威(Kazui)に助けられる.

I was thinking that since 暴行 can be a する verb, that maybe され had something to
do with that, but I'm really not sure. Can someone explain?
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2011-11-16T13:13:53.633
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2011-11-16T15:31:24.927
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question
verbs
What does され do in this sentence?
Yes your intuition is correct. It has something to do with する.

  * される is the passive verb form of する.

What does the passive-form do?

Compare:

> AはBをぶつ - "A hits B"
>
> AはBにぶたれる - "A gets hit by B" (The verb ぶつ is in the passive-construction)

* * *

Now why is it `され` and not `される`?

  * `され` is the `連用形` of the passive construction of the verb `する` for which auxiliaries such as `~そう`, `~ます` etc. may be appended to

Let's examine what `連用形+そう` does:

`~そう` is an auxiliary construction that presents what the verb is expressing
as a conjecture of the speaker concerning a present state or a future event
based on the speaker's observation.

Compare:

> 雨が降る "It is raining"
>
> 雨が降りそうです "It looks like it will rain"

Now we're left with combining `そう` with `~になる` "to become~" in past tense;
`~になった` "became ~", to form the expression `~そうになった` which is roughly means:

> Literally: became the state of "appearing to be ~"
>
> Natural Translation: almost/nearly did ~

* * *

The next step is putting all the parts together step by step:

>   * 暴行する - "to assault"
>
>   * 暴行される - "to get assaulted"
>
>   * 暴行されそうです - "looks like will get (or is being) assaulted"
>
>   * 暴行されそうになった - "became the state of "looks like will get (or is being)
> assaulted" "
>
>

Then we try to naturally understand the last step and end up with:

> "to almost get assaulted"

* * *

Now `暴行されそうになった` is followed by `ところを` (which I imagine is derived from ところ +
を + Elided Verb) (I'm not really sure where `ところを` comes from and also
deriving it would be out of the scope of this question)

  * `ところを` means something like "in the midst of" and is quite similar to `ときに` (Their difference would also be out of the scope of this question)

Their combination, `暴行されそうになったところを` would roughly mean "In the midst of almost
getting assaulted"
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