Marital Rape

Marital rape, also known as spousal rape, is non-consensual sex in which the perpetrator is the victim’s spouse. It is a form of partner rape, of domestic violence, and of sexual abuse. Once widely condoned or ignored by law, spousal rape is now repudiated by international conventions and increasingly criminalized. Still, in many countries, spousal rape either remains legal, or is illegal but widely tolerated and accepted as a husband’s prerogative.

The criminalization of rape in marriage is recent, having occurred during the past few decades. The legal and social concept of marital rape, has developed, in most industrialized countries, in the mid to late 20th century; and in many parts of the world it is still not recognized, socially and legally, as a form of abuse. Several countries in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia made spousal rape illegal before 1970, but other countries in Western Europe and the English-speaking Western World outlawed it much later, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s.

In many parts of the world the laws against marital rape are very new, having been enacted in the 2000s.

In the US spousal rape is illegal in all 50 states In Canada, spousal rape was outlawed in 1983, when several legal changes were made, including changing the rape statute to sexual assault, and making the laws gender neutral. Criminalization in Australia began with the state of New South Wales in 1981, followed by all other states from 1985 to 1992. New Zealand outlawed spousal rape in 1985, and Ireland in 1990. In England and Wales, spousal rape was made illegal in 1991, when the marital rape exemption was abolished by the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, in the case of R v R.