Marital Rape

When many people think of the word rape, they imagine a group of attackers in a dark alley late at night, disappearing after the crime never to be seen again. However, the sad fact is that the perpetrator is almost always an acquaintance of the victim, often a close friend or family member. Although the practice is almost certainly as old as the institution of marriage itself, marital rape, or the sexual assault of one’s spouse, is a particularly heinous example of this situation that has only recently begun to be viewed as the crime it truly is.

Problems of Recognition

Marital rape is one of the most difficult instances of sexual assault to acknowledge for both societal and personal reasons:

• A range of social factors have combined to keep marital rape from being viewed as a crime for hundreds of years. Due to religious and cultural values, the rape of a spouse was historically considered impossible, as those in wedlock were assumed to have “possession” of one another’s bodies.
• To this day, these social pressures often translate into personal factors that kept the victim from reporting the abuse, or from even recognizing it as such. Oftentimes, marital rape will go unrecognized because it may not be accompanied by any other signs of abuse that we typically associate with domestic crimes, such as battery or verbal assault.

Contact Us

Even as more and more countries around the globe begin to recognize rape within a marriage as a real crime, millions of cases go without the prosecution they deserve because the abused spouse feels helpless in the face of the external expectations of marriage. If you or a loved one has been the victim of spousal abuse, contact San Jose domestic violence attorney Daniel Jensen at 408-296-4100.