Sexual Assaults Within Marriages
Under English common law, rape within marriage had been considered impossible, by definition. For centuries, the leading figures in jurisprudence con- tended that under the marriage contract, a wife
V I C T IMS OF R AP E S AN D OT H E R S E XUAL AS S AULT S 371
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consented to yield to her husband’s desires wher- ever and whenever he wished. But during the 1970s, the antirape movement argued that all forced sex should be outlawed, no matter who the aggressor is and what his relationship to the victim might be. Hence, marital rape was “redis- covered” when the feminist perspective became widely accepted: that a wife retains the right to say “no” to her husband despite the license issued by the government, the wedding vows to “love, honor, and obey,” and religious teachings about submitting and performing wifely duties.
The forcible rape of a spouse first became offi- cially recognized as a crime in 1975, when South Dakota legislators rewrote the state’s statutes and rejected the common law exception that exempted husbands from arrest and granted them the “right” to unlimited sexual access (Russell, 1982). By 1990, in every state, that immunity no longer applied if his wife had separated from him and filed for divorce (Russell, 1990). By 1993, marital rape was a crime in all 50 states. By 2005, all spousal exemptions had been removed in 20 states. But in the remaining 30, husbands might be subjected to lesser charges and lower penalties than nonspouses, and wives had to report the offense more quickly (Hui, 2009).
Wives whose husbands force them to submit to unwanted degrading acts are the least likely sexual assault victims to report incidents, to be believed by the authorities, to have their cases adjudicated, and to secure convictions. The first known case of a husband prosecuted for raping his wife who still lived with him took place in 1978, but he was acquitted. Between 1978 and 1985, only 118 hus- bands were prosecuted across the country, although 104 of them (90 percent) were convicted, accord- ing to a report by a national clearinghouse on mar- ital rape (Barden, 1987).
Estimates about the incidence and prevalence of marital rape do not rest on a solid empirical foundation because the problem is still shrouded in secrecy. In 1978, a survey revealed that 14 per- cent of all wives confided that had been sexually assaulted by their husbands, a rate that was twice the nonspousal rate (Bui, 2009). According to
projections from a telephone survey, more than 1 million married women had been forced to per- form unwanted sexual acts one or more times by their husbands (Crime Victims Research and Treat- ment Center, 1992). The prevalence rate of marital rape during the course of a marriage was thought to range from as low as 8 percent (Russell, 1990) to as high as 25 percent (Bergen, 1998). A troubling proportion of women, ranging from 15 percent to 25 percent, reported that they were raped by an estranged or ex-husband or former live-in lover (Finkelhor and Yllo, 1985).
Raped wives endure problems similar to women who were sexually assaulted by noninti- mates. They are physically injured, psychologically scarred, and personally humiliated (Bowker, 1983). Raped wives also are battered wives in most cases. They are beaten periodically and raped repeatedly over years, and both the physical attacks and sexual assaults symbolize his need to dominate and subju- gate her (Peacock, 1998).