• U.S.

What If a Wife Says No?

2 minute read
TIME

“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 a 1990 study a House committee estimated that 1 in 7 married women will be raped by their spouses. Very few crimes will be reported, however, since women assume that no one will believe them. “People think marital rape is she has a headache and doesn’t want to have sex and she gives in,” says Ann Marie Tucker, executive director of the Citizens Committee on Rape, Sexual Assault and Sexual Abuse in Buffalo. “That isn’t it at all. The sexual abuse is often part of an ongoing pattern of physical intimidation and violence.”

Women who do press charges face a heavy burden of proof. The National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape in Berkeley reports that though 20 states have completely eliminated preferential treatment for husbands, 26 other states hover in a gray zone: without gross brutality, the husband has the benefit of the doubt. If prosecutors decide they have enough for a case, ( however, they usually win; between 1978 and 1985, only 118 cases of spousal rape went to trial, but 104 wound up with a conviction.

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