NCJ Number
207881
Journal
Violence Against Women Volume: 10 Issue: 12 Dated: December 2004 Pages: 1407-1416
Date Published
December 2004
Length
10 pages
Annotation
This article reviews the research on rape in intimate relationships 16 years ago, currently, and what can be expected and is needed in the future.
Abstract
In 1988, there were two books in the United States on the subject of rape in marriage: Diana Russell's (1982) "Rape in Marriage" and David Finkelhor and Kersti Yllo's (1985) "License to Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives." Although Richard Gelles (1977) is credited with writing the first article in a scholarly journal on the subject of rape in marriage, Russell demanded public scrutiny of this form of violence against women. Currently there is a relatively small body of literature on this significant social problem in American culture, and although rape in marriage is now criminalized under at least one of the sexual offense codes in all 50 States, the majority of States have some exemption for husbands from prosecution for wife rape. Thus, in the legal arena, wife rape continues to be viewed as a different type of crime than rape by a stranger. The author of this article, who wrote "Wife Rape: Understanding the Response of Survivors and Service Providers" (Bergen, 1996), is optimistic about future research in this area. This is because graduate and undergraduate students are showing increasing interest in research on wife rape; scholarly journals, such as "Violence Against Women," and Web sites, such as Violence Against Women Network, are focusing on the issue; and more practitioners in the field of violence against women are receiving training in dealing with rape in intimate partnerships. Areas that need investigation in the future are the effect of intimate-partner sexual violence on children, the reporting of intimate-partner sexual violence as a crime, and a national study of how diverse populations of women experience sexual violence by intimate partners. 22 references