Not too long ago, the term “marital rape” was considered an oxymoron. In some U.S. states, it might as well still be one.
Lawmakers in Ohio are trying to remove archaic forms of “marital privilege” in state laws pertaining to rape, The Columbus Dispatch reports. Although marital rape is illegal in Ohio as well as nationwide, the notion of marital privilege or exemption dates from an era when a man could only be charged with rape if the alleged victim was not his wife—an era that only ended in the United States on July 5, 1993 when North Carolina criminalized marital rape, becoming the final state to do so.
But although marital rape is illegal in the United States, Ohio is one of several states in which marital rape continues to be handled in a substantially different way than rape outside of marriage, whether it is charged under a different section of criminal code, restricted to a shorter reporting period, held to a different standard of coercion and force, or given a different punishment. Together, these double standards make marital rape—an already “infrequently prosecuted” crime according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN)—even more challenging to prosecute.
As of April 2014, according to an AEquitas report, eight states still had marital rape exemptions for some offenses, not including the states without exemptions that simply prosecute marital rape differently.
Ohio state law, for example, contains two distinct subsections for rape, one of which applies only to “sexual conduct” with someone who is “not the spouse of the offender” or a separated spouse. This section applies to situations in which the offender uses a “drug, intoxicant, or controlled substance” to lessen the victim’s resistance and cases in which the victim has a “mental or physical condition” that prevents consent. But this section does not apply to sexual conduct between cohabitating spouses, in which case there must be “force or threat of force”—not just coercion—for rape legislation to even apply in the first place.
[For more of this story, written by Samantha Allen, go to http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...gal-in-8-states.html]
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