Rape in Marriage and in Dating Relationships: How Bad Is It for Mental Health? a

Even a cursory examination suggests that victims of marital and date rape suffer the additional burdens of legal and attitudinal discrimination as compared to victims of stranger rape. After considerable study, the Attorney General's Task Force on Family Violence Report ' concluded that there has been a long-standing tendency for the general public and for the criminal justice system to treat victims of violent crimes, such as rape, perpetrated by family members or loved ones less favorably than victims of identical crimes committed by strangers. One example of discrimination against marital rape victims is the marital exclusion in the criminal rape statutes of many states, which specifically states that rape cannot occur between husband and wife, because the wife is presumed to have given perpetual consent for sexual relations upon taking the marriage vows. Another example is the fact that crime victim compensation statutes in many states exclude from eligibility victims whose assailants reside in the same household as the victim. Thus, marital rape victims cannot receive compensation for treatment of physical or psychological injuries sustained in an attack by their husbands. Perhaps an even more devastating form of discrimination is that many people, sometimes including the victims themselves, do not define attacks as rape unless the assailant is a stranger. As Burt2 and others have shown, the general public holds stereotypes about rape, including the belief that virtually all rapes are committed by strangers. KOSS~ as well as Kilpatrick and Veronen4 have shown that these stereotypes and beliefs extend to victims themselves. Both these investigators asked representative samples of college students (Koss') and adult women in the general population (Kilpatrick and Veronen4) whether they had ever had experiences involving nonconsensual completed oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse in which the assailant had used force or threat of force. This type of experience would be legally defined as rape in most jurisdictions, unless the statute in that jurisdiction contained a marital exclusion. A substantial proportion of respondents in both studies reported having had one or more experiences that met the legal definition of rape, but responded negatively when asked if they had ever been raped. KOSS' refers to such women as unacknowledged rape victims. In both the KOSS' and the Kilpatrick and Veronen4 studies, the probability