Nothing can be said in favor of intimate sexual violence, including marital rape, as Randall and Venkatesh, the authors of Intimate Sexual Violence, Human Rights Obligations and the State, make plain. As the New York Court of Appeals held in 1984:
Rape is not simply a sexual act to which one party does not consent. Rather, it is a degrading, violent act which violates the bodily integrity of the victim and frequently causes severe, long-lasting physical and psychic harm. To ever imply consent to such an act is irrational and absurd. . . . A married woman has the same right to control her body as does an unmarried woman.There is something to be said, however, in favor of clearly setting out a legal position before condemning it, in favor of a conservative approach to the wholesale expansion of human rights, and in favor of enabling women, even women in states that do not criminalize marital rape, to set their own priorities. The authors draw on international law to make a passionate case against marital rape, and against domestic laws that fail to recognize it as a crime. Their argument would be more persuasive if their demand for what domestic law must criminalize were clearer, if their international legal analysis were more rigorous and more focused, and if they justified the top-down approach they recommend here, which seems particularly problematic in this context.
Does International Law Really Require the Criminalization of Marital Rape?