Marital Rape

Marital Rape

Marital rape is a serious form of violence against women that can have life-shattering effects for its victims. While marital rape has been illegal in every state and the District of Columbia since 1993, there is still more progress to be made on this front:

Research suggests that at least 10-14% of women are raped by spouses, and that at least 20% of women who are battered are also raped as a part of the abuse. And, until recently, the subject of spousal rape has not received as much attention as it should.

What is Marital Rape?

Marital rape occurs when your spouse forces you to take part in certain sex acts without your consent. It is a form of intimate partner violence, i.e., an abuse of power by which one spouse attempts to establish dominance and control over the other. Research shows that it can be equally, if not more, emotionally and physically traumatizing than rape by a stranger.

While every state has its own laws on the subject, broadly defined, marital rape includes “any unwanted intercourse or penetration (vaginal, anal, or oral) obtained by force, threat of force, or when the wife is unable to consent.” If you have experienced rape by your spouse, you have the right to make a police report. Know that you are not alone and can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE for help at any hour of the day.

How is Marital Rape Punished?

It was not until the late 1970s that anyone was convicted of raping his spouse in the United States. Before then, criminal codes typically included a “marital rape exemption,” or provision barring prosecution for the rape of one’s spouse. Such laws reflected then popularly held views that only stranger rape constituted “real rape” or that forced sex is a “wifely duty.”

This thinking mirrored the common law presumption, in effect for hundreds of years, that spouses should be exempt from prosecution. It was based in a theory articulated by Matthew Hale, [Chief Justice in England in the 17th century, who] “wrote: “[t]he husband cannot be guilty of rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract, the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto the husband which she cannot retract.”¹

In the 1970s and 1980s, numerous states adopted laws criminalizing marital rape, and by July 1993, it was illegal in every state to rape your spouse. States took these three approaches to criminalizing marital rape:

• Some states simply abolished the marital rape exemption by striking it from the books. (To illustrate: if the code defined rape as “sexual intercourse with a woman, not your wife, by force and against her will,” the legislature could strike the phrase “not your wife,” thereby abolishing the marital rape exemption). Under this approach, which most states followed, marital rape is treated the same as other forms of rape.
• Some states explicitly eliminated marriage as a defense to the charge of rape.
• Some states retained their marital rape exemption in the code, and enacted an additional provision creating a separate offense of marital rape (sometimes with lesser penalties than for other forms of rape).

Despite these changes in state laws, marital rape is still prevalent today; and, like other forms of rape, it remains one of the least reported crimes. Also, it is still regarded by some as a less serious crime than rape committed by a stranger—an attitude reflected in certain states’ laws:

• Some states have imposed extra reporting requirements on victims, e.g., a shorter deadline (30 days or one year) for reporting the incident;
• Some states make it harder to prove marital rape than other forms of rape, e.g., by requiring a showing that force or threats were used (when other laws against rape require only a showing of lack of consent). Other states do not criminalize the conduct if the wife is legally unable to consent (e.g., due to a severe disability).

For detailed information on your state’s current requirements, consult your state coalition against sexual assault.

How Common is Marital Rape?

Most victims of marital rape are women.² Marital rape—like other forms of rape—can occur among women of any specific age, race, ethnicity, social class, or geographic location. Also like other forms of rape, marital rape is largely underreported. Research on the prevalence of marital rape indicates:

• At least 10-14% of married women will experience rape in marriage.³
• Among battered women, the rate of marital rape is even higher, with as many as two-thirds of physically abused women reporting sexual assault as well.
• Nearly two-thirds of women who reported being raped, physically assaulted, or stalked since the age of 18 were victimized by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date, according to the National Violence Against Women Survey, 2000.⁴ This same survey concluded that approximately 1.5 million women and over 800,000 men are raped and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner each year.
• In 2001, 41,740 American women were victims of rape/sexual assault committed by an intimate partner.
• The health costs of marital rape, physical assault, and stalking amount to a staggering $5.8 billion annually (of which nearly $4.1 billion is for direct medical and mental health care services), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. See National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, “Costs of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in the United States.”

What Special Issues Do Victims Face?

As described by one survivor,⁵ the special issues faced by marital rape victims (as distinguished from other rape victims) include:

• Longer recovery from trauma. Contrary to popular belief, the trauma actually may last longer for the marital rape victim than for the stranger rape victim. Reasons include lack of recognition and ability to share the pain,⁶ and the profound sense of a betrayal of trust. See Louise McOrmond-Plummer, “Considering the Differences: Intimate Partner Sexual Violence in Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Discourse,” 10 Connections 5 (Spring/Summer 2008).
• Higher likelihood of physical injury. Rapes do not always involve physical injury, and those that do are likely to be spousal rapes. (Among women who are physically assaulted or raped by an intimate partner, one in three is injured, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)
• Higher likelihood of repeated assaults. Research shows that women who are marital rape victims are more likely to experience repeated assaults than other rape victims; in fact, among battered women, sexual assault may be a routine part of the pattern of the abuse. As noted by one researcher “[w]omen who are raped and battered by their partners experience the violence in various ways—e.g., some are battered during the sexual violence or the rape may follow a physically violent episode where the husband wants to ‘make up’ and forces his wife to have sex against her will.”
• The married perpetrator is more likely to use “anal and oral rape to humiliate, punish and take ‘full’ ownership of their partners,” say researchers. Louise McOrmond-Plummer, “Considering the Differences: Intimate Partner Sexual Violence in Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Discourse,” 10 Connections 5 (Spring/Summer 2008).
• Pressure to stay with perpetrator. A victim with children who lacks outside employment may be financially dependent on the spouse and feel there is no way to leave the situation, and the victim may face additional pressure from family members or friends to remain with the perpetrator.
• Negative effects on children in the household. Such children may witness the sexual violence or otherwise be affected by it.⁷
• Difficulty identifying what happened as a crime. A victim may find it difficult, for cultural reasons, to define the other spouse’s conduct as rape or identify someone she married and loves as a “rapist.”

A Profile of Marital Rape Offenders

Who are the perpetrators of marital rape? Overwhelmingly they are men, and research suggests that such men regard their wives as property, or see sex on demand as a duty of marriage. They may use rape as punishment or to assert control or as an expression of anger, and they may fail to recognize their own behavior as rape.

Where Can I Learn More?

While compiling this information, we reviewed hundreds of web resources. The following hyperlinks will take you to those we found most useful.

Click here for National, State, Academic & International Resources

Footnotes

1. David Finkelhor and Kersti Yllo, License to Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives at 2, The Free Press, New York (1985).
2. According to estimates from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), “[a]bout 588,490, or 85% of victimizations by intimate partners in 2001 were against women. Intimate partner violence made up 20% of violent crime against women in 2001. By contrast, during the year intimate partners committed 3% of all nonfatal violence against men.” Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crime Data Brief by Callie Marie Rennison, Ph.D., BJS Statistician, “Intimate Partner Violence 1993-2001.”
3. Id. at 7.
4. “The NVAWS asked the 8,000 U.S. women ages 18 and older if they had been victims of IPV [Intimate Partner Violence] at any time in their lives or within the 12 months preceding the survey…. Of the female NVAWS respondents, 7.7% had been raped by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetimes; 0.2% reported intimate partner rape in the past 12 months. Extrapolating these percentages to U.S. Census population data, nearly 7.8 million women have been raped by an intimate partner at some time in their lives, and an estimated 201,394 women are raped by an intimate partner each year…. Because some respondents reported multiple intimate partner rapes in the 12 months preceding the survey, the incidence of rape exceeded the prevalence. Women who were raped in that year experienced an average of 1.6 victimizations. This calculates to an estimated 322,230 rapes by intimate partners each year, an annual victimization rate of 3.2 intimate partner rapes per 1,000 women [322,230 rapes / 100,697,000 women = 0.0032 or 3.2 per 1000].” Centers for Disease Control, “Incidence, Prevalence, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in the United States”.
5. See Louise McOrmond-Plummer, “Considering the Differences: Intimate Partner Sexual Violence in Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Discourse,” in 10 Connections 5 (Spring/Summer 2008).
6. Id. (citing David Finkelhor and Kersti Yllo, License to Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives, n. 2, 135-37, The Free Press, New York (1985) ).
7. “Campbell and Alford (1989) found that 5% of the women in their study indicated that their children had been forced by their partners to participate in the sexual violence and 18% of the women indicated that their children had witnessed an incident of marital rape at least once (in Mahoney & Williams, 1998).” Id.