"But if you can't rape your wife, who can you rape?" A crude joke, but a fair reflection of a common attitude for most of history. Until 1979, most states had rape laws that explicitly protected husbands from prosecution for even the most violent rapes of their wives. For a woman to refuse to sleep with her husband was grounds for divorce. But over the past decade, the attitudes and the laws have slowly shifted. A generation that saw an epidemic of wife beating and wife murder could hardly pretend that sexual violence within marriage was not also a crime. In...
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