Marital rape or spousal rape is the act of sexual intercourse with one's married spouse without the spouse's consent. The lack of consent is the essential element and does not always involve physical violence. Marital rape is considered a form of domestic violence and sexual abuse. While historically regarded as a right of husbands, the act is widely considered as rape in modern times and is becoming increasingly criminalized by many countries' laws. However, it remains unacknowledged by some more conservative cultures.
The issues of sexual and domestic violence within marriage and the family unit, and more specifically, the issue of violence against women, have come to growing international attention from the second half of the 20th century. Still, in many countries, marital rape either remains outside the criminal law, or is illegal but widely tolerated. Laws are rarely enforced, due to factors ranging from reluctance of authorities to pursue the crime, to lack of public knowledge that sexual intercourse in marriage without consent is illegal.
Marital rape is more widely experienced by women, though not exclusively. Marital rape is often a chronic form of violence for the victim which takes place within abusive relations. It exists in a complex web of state governments, cultural practices, and societal ideologies which combine to influence each distinct instance and situation in varying ways. The reluctance to define non-consensual sex between married couples as a crime and to prosecute has been attributed to traditional views of marriage, interpretations of religious doctrines, ideas about male and female sexuality, and to cultural expectations of subordination of a wife to her husband — views which continue to be common in many parts of the world. These views of marriage and sexuality started to be challenged in most Western countries from the 1960s and 70s especially by second-wave feminism, leading to an acknowledgment of the woman's right to self-determination of all matters relating to her body, and the withdrawal of the exemption or defense of marital rape.
Most countries criminalized marital rape from the late 20th century onward — very few legal systems allowed for the prosecution of rape within marriage before the 1970s. Criminalization has occurred through various ways, including removal of statutory exemptions from the definitions of rape, judicial decisions, explicit legislative reference in statutory law preventing the use of marriage as a defense, or creation of a specific offense of marital rape, albeit at a lower level of punishment. In many countries, it is still unclear whether marital rape is covered by the ordinary rape laws, but in some countries non-consensual sexual relations involving coercion may be prosecuted under general statutes prohibiting violence, such as assault and battery laws.
History
Historically, in much of the world, rape was seen as a crime or tort of theft of a man's property (usually either a husband or father). In this case, property damage meant that the crime was not legally recognized as damage against the victim, but instead to her father or husband's property. Therefore, by definition a husband could not rape his wife. The view that a husband cannot be charged with the rape of his wife was described by Sir Matthew Hale (1609–1676) in History of the Pleas of the Crown, published posthumously in 1736, where he wrote that "The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract". Also, American and English law subscribed until the 20th century to the system of coverture, that is, a legal doctrine under which, upon marriage, a woman's legal rights were subsumed by those of her husband. The implication was that once unified by marriage, a spouse could no longer be charged with raping one's spouse, anymore than be charged with raping oneself.
Many jurisdictions, including all fifty U.S. states, had criminalized marital rape by the 1990s. English common law also had a great impact on many legal systems of the world through colonialism.
Kersti Yllö states in the prologue of Understanding Marital Rape In a Global Context, "In some cultures, consent is not even something that an individual wife can give. The families that arranged the marriage guarantee her permanent consent." Control over a wife's sexuality was only a part of the greater control that men had in all other areas concerning her. A husband's control over his wife's body could also be seen in the way adultery between a wife and another man was constructed; for example in 1707, English Lord Chief Justice John Holt described the act of a man having sexual relations with another man's wife as "the highest invasion of property". For this reason, in many cultures there was a conflation between the crimes of rape and adultery, since both were seen and understood as a violation of the rights of the husband. Spousal rape was considered a property crime against a husband, not against a woman's right to self-determination.
The property to be withheld in a female was her virginity; this was the commodity. Following this line of logic, a woman was (and still is in many cultures across the globe) first the property of her father, then, upon marriage, the property of her husband. Therefore, a man could not be prosecuted for raping his own wife because she was his possession. However, if another man raped someone's wife, this was essentially stealing property (a women's sexuality). In English customs, "bride capture" (a man claiming a woman through rape) was thought to be stealing a father's property by raping his daughter. Therefore, rape laws were created to "protect the property interests men had in their women, not to protect women themselves".
In some cultures, marriage is arranged for the purpose of creating access to procreation. In these situations, the parties do not necessarily consent to marriage (in the case of forced marriage). Following this logic, if consent is not part of marriage, then it is not necessary for intercourse. The autonomy of the wife is also often compromised in cultures where bride price is paid. Under customary law in certain parts of Africa, forced sex in marriage was not prohibited, although some specific circumstances, such as during advanced pregnancy, immediately after childbirth, during menstruation, or during mourning for a deceased close relative, were recognized as giving the wife the right to refuse sex.
Rape has been, until recent decades, understood as a crime against honor and reputationnot only in domestic legislation, but also in international law; for example according to the Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, "Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault". It was not until the 1990s that the International Criminal Court statute recognized crimes of sexual violence as violent crimes against the person; "Not until the last half century was rape understood to be an offense against the woman, against her dignity, instead of against her family's or her husband's honor".
Legal aspect Historically, many cultures have had a concept of spouses' conjugal rights to sexual intercourse with each other. This can be seen in English common law, in force in Anglo America and the British Commonwealth, where the very concept of marital rape was treated as an impossibility. This was illustrated most vividly by Sir Matthew Hale (1609–1676), in his legal treatise Historia Placitorum Coronæ or History of the Pleas of the Crown (posthumously, 1736) where he wrote that "The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract."Historia Placitorum Coronæ page629
Formalization of the marital rape exemption in law
Common law and the United Kingdom
Sir Matthew Hale's statement in History of the Pleas of the Crown did not cite a legal precedent for it, though it relied on earlier standards. In a case of Lord Audley's (1593–1631), for instance, Hale cite's the jurist Bracton (c. 1210c. 1268) support of this rule, said to have derived from laws of King Æthelstan (r. 927–939) where upon the law holds that even "were the party of no chaste life, but a whore, yet there may be ravishment: but it is a good plea to say she was his concubine". A lawful marriage legitimizes the conjugal act itself, so "marital rape" is a contradiction in terms. While a physical assault against a spouse may be charged, such is distinct from the delegitimization of conjugal union itself as rape. Marriage then should not be defined as an "exemption" to rape but as "contradictory" to it. Marriage created conjugal rights between spouses, and marriage could not be annulled except by a private act of Parliament—it therefore follows that a spouse could not revoke conjugal rights from the marriage, and therefore there could be no rape between spouses. The principle was repeated in East's Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown in 1803 and in Archbold's Pleading and Evidence in Criminal Cases in 1822. The principle was framed as an exemption to the law of rape in an English courtroom in R v Clarence,R v Clarence (1888) 22 QBD 23 but it was not overturned until 1991 by the House of Lords in the case of R v R in 1991, where it was described as an anachronistic and offensive legal fiction.
Feminist critique in the 19th century From the beginnings of the 19th century feminist movement, activists challenged the presumed right of men to engage in forced or coerced sex with their wives. In the United States, "the nineteenth-century woman's rights movement fought against a husband's right to control marital intercourse in a campaign that was remarkably developed, prolific, and insistent, given nineteenth-century taboos against the public mention of sex or sexuality." Suffragists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone "singled out a woman's right to control marital intercourse as the core component of equality."
Nineteenth century feminist demands centered on the right of women to control their bodies and fertility, positioned consent in marital sexual relations as an alternative to contraception and abortion (which many opposed), and also embraced eugenic concerns about excessive procreation. British liberal feminists John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor attacked marital rape as a gross double standard in law and as central to the subordination of women.
Advocates of the Free Love Movement, including early anarcha-feminists such as Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman, as well as Victoria Woodhull, Thomas Low Nichols, and Mary Gove Nichols, joined a critique of marital rape to advocate women's autonomy and sexual pleasure. Moses Harman, a Kansas-based publisher and advocate for women's rights, was jailed twice under the Comstock laws for publishing articles (by a woman who was victimized and a doctor who treated marital rape survivors) decrying marital rape. De Cleyre defended Harman in a well-known article, Sex Slavery (essay). She refused to draw any distinction between rape outside of and within marriage: "And that is rape, where a man forces himself sexually upon a woman whether he is licensed by the marriage law to do it or not."
British philosopher and writer Bertrand Russell in his book Marriage and Morals (1929) deplored the situation of married women. He wrote "Marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution."
20th- and 21st-century criminalization