Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T07:40:15.901Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Marital Rape, Consent, and Human Rights: Comment on “Criminalizing Sexual Violence Against Women in Intimate Relationships”

Part of: International Legal Obligation to Criminalize Marital Rape

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Robin West
Robin West*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University Law Center
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Randall and Venkatesh’s important essay Criminalizing Sexual Violence against Women in Intimate Relationships is a breakthrough in our understanding of human rights, rape, and the institution of marriage, and the intersection of the three. Rape within marriage, the authors argue, strips its victims of multiple human rights, and therefore any state’s refusal to criminalize it is a violation of international law. However, more than half the countries in the world, according to the authors, fail to explicitly criminalize rape or sexual assault within marriage (which I will sometimes call “marital rape” in this comment). In this comment I will first briefly elaborate on the authors’ thesis, emphasizing what it tells us about the meaning, respectively, of “marriage,” “rape,” and “law.” I will then register three objections, or qualifications, to their argument.

Type
Symposium on the International Legal Obligation to Criminalize Marital Rape
Information
AJIL Unbound , Volume 109 , 2015 , pp. 197 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2015

References

1 Randall, Melanie & Venkatesh, Vasanthi, Criminalizing Sexual Violence against Women in Intimate Relationships: State Obligations under Human Rights Law, 109 AJIL Unbound 189 (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See Hasday, Jill Elaine, Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape, 88 Cal. L.J. 1373 (2000)Google Scholar.

3 See Rubenfeld, Jed, The Riddle of Rape by Fraud, 122 Yale L.J. 1372 (2013)Google Scholar; Anderson, Scott, Conceptualizing Rape as Coercion Sex, Ethics (forthcoming)Google Scholar.

4 Randall and Venkatesh, supra note 1, at 194.

5 Anderson, supra note 3; Robin West, Rape, Consent and Coercion, Jotwell (forthcoming).