How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

by James O'Brien

1984, when the Criminal Review Committee rejected the idea that ‘marital rape’ could be a crime. 1984. I was 12. The language is like something from The Handmaid’s Tale: The majority of us … believe that rape cannot be considered in the abstract as merely ‘sexual intercourse without consent’. The circumstances of rape may be peculiarly grave. This feature is not present in the case of a husband and wife cohabiting with each other when an act of sexual intercourse occurs without the wife’s consent. They may well have had sexual intercourse regularly before the act in question and, because a sexual relationship may involve a degree of compromise, she may sometimes have agreed only with some reluctance to such intercourse. Should he go further and force her to have sexual intercourse without her consent, this may evidence a failure of the marital relationship. But it is far from being the ‘unique’ and ‘grave’ offence described earlier. Where the husband goes so far as to cause injury, there are available a number of offences against the person with which he may be charged, but the gravamen of the husband’s conduct is the injury he has caused, not the sexual intercourse he has forced.fn2