Wife Rape

Understanding the Response of Survivors and Service Providers

Raquel Kennedy Bergen

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9781506320878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

With expertise and sensitivity, the author of this accessibly written volume addresses a real but long-neglected problem: the pain and humiliation of sexual assault suffered by many women at the hands of their partners.

Extensive gathering of personal testimony from survivors, together with interviews with service providers, bears witness to a lack of validation and insufficient assistance currently available for such women. This volume gives hope to survivors and provides critical information for service providers to gain a better understanding of the seriousness of the problem.

1

An Introduction to the
Problem of Wife Rape

It was very clear to me. He raped me. He ripped off my pajamas, he beat me up. I mean some scumbag down the street would do that to me. So to me it wasn’t any different because I was married to him, it was rape—real clear what it was. . . . I guess I can’t say I would have been more fearful with a stranger because I didn’t know when he was going to stop or if he was going to kill me. I never knew when he would stop beating me either. He would just stop when he got tired or whatever.

Karen

There needs to be somewhere for these women [survivors of wife rape] to go. I’ve been screwed by every agency in the area. This is a crime, no matter if your husband does this or not. Nobody has the right to drag me by my hair into the room and do that. There’s such embarrassment and degradation you go through because you’re a wife and some stranger didn’t do it. It goes beyond the word callous—how people treat you. And you don’t know where to go for this type of a problem. You can’t get help and women need help. They need to know this is a crime and help those like me who were isolated—so isolated he wouldn’t let me leave the house.

Wanda

This book is about the problem of wife rape. These quotations, taken from interviews with survivors of wife rape, provide answers to the two most important questions that have guided my research.¹ First, how do women understand and define their experiences of wife rape? Second, what is the response of agencies to women who seek their help?

As other researchers have established, wife rape is a very serious problem. An estimated 14% to 25% of women experience forced sex at least once during their marriages (Resnick, Kilpatrick, Walsh, & Veronen, 1991; Russell, 1990). Rape in marriage may well be the most common form of sexual assault, particularly if we consider that women who are involved in physically violent relationships may be especially vulnerable to being raped by their partners (Browne, 1993; Campbell, 1989; Russell, 1990; Walker, 1979). Research indicates that between one third and one half of battered women are raped by their partners and that sexual abuse is characteristic of the most violent relationships (Campbell, 1989; Hanneke, Shields, & McCall, 1986; Pagelow, 1992).

My intent in writing this book is not to contribute to knowledge about the prevalence of wife rape (for this, see Diana Russell’s 1990 work²) but to provide a much needed analysis of how women experience wife rape and the response of institutions to women’s help-seeking behavior. This analysis is shaped by my interviews with 40 survivors of wife rape and 37 service providers, my participant observation at a rape crisis center and battered women’s shelter, and a survey of women’s agencies in the United States. My hope is that service providers, as well as a variety of other interested people, will better understand the serious problem of wife rape after reading this book.

A Brief Legal History of Wife Rape

Thirty years ago, the topic of wife rape would not have been the focus of a scholarly paper, much less a book. Indeed, it is only recently that the United States has acknowledged that a man can be prosecuted for raping his wife. In the United States, as well as most other societies,³ a husband could not be legally sanctioned for raping his wife until quite recently. This “marital rape exemption” still influences sexual assault legislation.

Russell (1990) argues that the origin of the marital rape exemption was the social understanding that women were the property of men, first of their fathers and then of their husbands. This is reflected in the first law of marriage decreed by Romulus of Rome in the 8th century B.C., a law that “obliged married women, as having no other refuge, to conform themselves entirely to the temper of their husbands and the husbands to rule their wives as necessary and inseparable possessions” (Sonkin, 1987, p. 6). Thus, with marriage, women became the property of their husbands.

The treatment of women as property is particularly evident when we examine the history of rape legislation. Rape laws were originally enacted as property laws, to protect a man’s property (a daughter or a wife) from other men, not as laws to protect women or their rights to control their bodies (Pagelow, 1984). Thus, the penalty for rape was intended to punish a man for defiling another man’s property. If a daughter was raped, her father could be compensated for the loss of his valuable property—his daughter’s virginity. A husband could also be compensated for the violation of his sexual property if his wife was raped by another man. However, as owners of this property, husbands could not be charged with the rape of their wives (Dobash & Dobash, 1979).

This ideology was reinforced by the statements of Sir Matthew Hale, Chief Justice in 17th-century England. Hale’s dictum, based on the notion of women as sexual property, is the foundation for the current marital rape exemption (Brownmiller, 1975). In the History of the Pleas of the Crown, published in 1736, Hale wrote, “The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract, the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto the husband which she cannot retract” (quoted in Russell, 1990, p. 17).

In this pronouncement, Hale (a known misogynist who burned women at the stake as witches; Finkelhor & Yllö, 1985) argued that marriage implies an irrevocable consent to sex (Russell, 1990). By his reasoning, once married, a woman does not have the right to refuse sex with her husband for any reason. Furthermore, even if a woman had possessed the right to refuse intercourse, under British common law, she would have had no legal recourse to accuse her husband of rape because of the principle of matrimonial unity.

Reflecting this principle, legal thinker William Blackstone wrote in the late 1760s that “by marriage the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended in marriage” (Dobash & Dobash, 1979, p. 60). Once married, a wife’s identity became legally merged with her husband’s; she was not able to own property, have custody of children, or file charges against him. Accusing her husband of rape would have been impossible, because when her husband raped her, he was in effect raping himself, which was not plausible (Barshis, 1983; Turetsky, 1981). Clearly, with marriage, a husband gained a sexual title to his wife and an exemption from the charge of rape.

Until recently, this notion of sexual entitlement in marriage was largely accepted by U.S. courts. For example, in 1952, the Corpus Juris Secundum read, “Rape cannot be committed by a husband on his wife, either because such intercourse is not considered unlawful or because by marriage she consents to the intercourse with her husband, which [permission] she cannot withdraw” (quoted in Astor, 1974, p. 78).

These archaic understandings of rape were challenged in the 1970s, when the women’s movement argued for the elimination of the spousal exemption in rape legislation (Bidwell & White, 1986). In 1978, John Rideout became the first man in the United States to be prosecuted for a rape he committed on his wife while he was living with her (Russell, 1990). Since this time, significant advances have been made in repealing state spousal exemptions from rape prosecution, using the argument that the exemptions do not provide all women with equal protection from rape (see People v. Liberta [Finkelhor & Yllö, 1985]). In particular, Laura X, the director of the National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape, and other concerned feminists have been campaigning for changes in federal and state laws, the military code, and the laws of other countries.

In the United States, raping one’s wife is now a crime in all 50 states, according to at least one section of the sexual offense codes. However, in 33 of these states, husbands are still exempt from prosecution in some situations.⁴ (See Appendix C, “State Law Chart.”) Ironically, in most of these states, a husband is exempt if his wife is vulnerable and unable to consent because she is mentally or physically impaired, unconscious, or asleep (Russell, 1990). This exemption indicates that a husband is entitled to take unfair advantage of his wife when she is helpless to defend herself.

Although there have been some important changes in the legal status of wife rape, the marital exemption has not been stricken from rape laws across the board. It is essential to do this, for as Pagelow (1984) notes,

As long as husbands can rape wives with impunity from the law—women do not own their bodies. Striking the marital privilege to rape will be a signal to some possessive and violent men that their wives are not their property. (p. 423)

The current existence of spousal exemptions to rape under certain circumstances perpetuates the problem of wife rape because it allows individuals to believe that this behavior is somehow acceptable. Furthermore, it indicates the prevalence of the social understanding that women are still the property of their husbands and that the marriage contract is an entitlement to sex (Russell, 1990). The criminalization of wife rape under all circumstances is a necessary step toward eliminating this heinous crime.

Public Attention and Wife Rape

Given the legal ambiguity of wife rape, it is not surprising that there has been little popular discussion of wife rape in the United States. My review of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature reveals that, prior to 1971, there was little information on sexual assault in general and virtual silence on the specific topic of wife rape. The first article to appear in a popular magazine was titled “Legal Rape” and appeared in Family Circle in 1979 (Russell, 1990). Between 1979 and 1992, articles on wife rape appeared sporadically and focused primarily on state legislative changes. Between 1993 and 1994, the number of articles in popular journals increased (to a total of 27), largely as a result of the infamous case of John and Lorena Bobbitt.

Three cases of wife rape have received a relatively significant amount of press coverage in the United States. John Rideout was the first man to be criminally prosecuted for raping his wife while they were living together. The case of John and Greta Rideout drew a great deal of media attention and eventually became the basis for a television movie. This case was notorious because John Rideout was acquitted, and shortly thereafter, the Rideouts publicly announced their reconciliation (Russell, 1990). However, the media paid scant attention when Greta finally escaped John’s violence, and he was convicted of several charges, including harassment. The media coverage of this case contributed to the popular perception that wife rape is not a serious offense.

In 1992, the media focused on a second case of wife rape. In South Carolina, Trish Crawford claimed that her husband, Dale, tied her to their bed, terrorized her with a knife, and raped her. The case went to trial, and the prosecution felt that their case was strong because Dale Crawford had videotaped the scene. However, Crawford was acquitted by a jury who apparently believed that his wife enjoyed sadomasochistic sex. The jurors came to this conclusion after hearing Trish’s first husband testify about their sexual history. In contrast, police reports of physical and sexual abuse by Dale’s first wife were ruled inadmissible. Both Dale and Trish Crawford appeared on several television programs to discuss their experiences, and many concerned feminists in South Carolina have since campaigned to change the rape legislation (Wertheimer, 1992).

In the most recent case, John Wayne Bobbitt was charged with and acquitted of raping his wife, Lorena, in Manassas, Virginia. Lorena claimed that she had suffered years of physical and sexual abuse and that, after one incident of rape, she had severed her husband’s penis with a kitchen knife. Lorena was later found innocent by reason of insanity and sentenced to a mental institution for up to 45 days to undergo evaluation (Laura X, 1994). This case and the subsequent trial received both national and international attention. The Bobbitts seemed to strike a nerve in the population, as people debated which was the more serious crime—rape or severing a penis—and how each party should be punished. Although the Bobbitt case certainly drew public attention to the problem of wife rape, the case was highly sensationalized, and the trauma that Lorena experienced was trivialized.

The notoriety of these three cases was short-lived, and wife rape has remained relatively hidden from the public eye. Indeed, the topic of wife rape receives little public attention in comparison with other issues such as date rape and domestic violence. Thus, it is not surprising that many people do not consider this to be a serious problem. The few studies that have examined the public’s perception of sexual assault all reveal similar findings with regard to rape in marriage. For example, Gordon and Riger (1989) found that the majority of men and women surveyed (64% and 63% respectively) did not characterize “unwanted sexual intercourse between a husband and wife” as rape (p. 61). In a study that asked people to rank the severity of 140 crimes, “forcible rape of a former spouse” ranked 62, below selling marijuana and mugging and stealing $25 (in Finkelhor & Yllö, 1985, pp. 152-154). Clearly, the general public is unaware of the serious nature of this problem.

However, the media and the general public are not alone in neglecting the issue of wife rape and the serious ramifications of this form of sexual assault; scholars have done so as well. Diana Russell’s groundbreaking book, Rape in Marriage, was first published in 1982; it was based on her interviews with 87 survivors of wife rape. Also in 1982, an article on Greta Rideout appeared in Ms. magazine. Besides Russell’s book, only one other book, License to Rape, by David Finkelhor and Kersti Yllö (1985) has been published on this topic in the United States. Both of these books draw on in-depth interviews with survivors of wife rape and thus are important for documenting the trauma associated with this type of violence. Furthermore, both books were instrumental in exposing the traditional tolerance of wife rape in this country and in documenting the widespread nature of this problem.

Beyond this research, wife rape has been relatively understudied compared with other forms of interpersonal violence. Some researchers have focused on its association with battering (Campbell, 1989; Frieze, 1983; Gelles, 1977; Hanneke & Shields, 1985; Walker, 1979) and the legal ramifications of the marital rape exemption statute (Augustine, 1991; Drucker, 1979; Griffin, 1980). However, compared with the amount of research devoted to other forms of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Dedication
• 1. An Introduction to the Problem of Wife Rape
• 2. Understanding Women’s Experiences of Wife Rape
• 3. Defining and Ending the Violence
• 4. The Response of Two Agencies to Wife Rape
• 5. Providing Services to Wife Rape Survivors—Current Trends and Future Directions
• Appendix A: Resource Guide for Survivors of Wife Rape
• Appendix B: Where to Call for More Information
• Appendix C: State Law Chart
• Appendix D: Researching Wife Rape
• Appendix E: Research Instruments
• References
• Index
• About the Author