- Title
- Marital rape and the marital rapist: the 1976 South Australian rape law reforms
- Creator
- Featherstone, Lisa; Winn, Alexander George
- Relation
- ARC.DP150101798 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP150101798
- Relation
- Feminist Legal Studies Vol. 27, Issue 1, p. 57-78
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10691-018-9382-3
- Publisher
- Springer
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- This article charts a genealogy of marital rape law reform in South Australia in the 1970s, arguing that the new laws were based on constructing the marital rapist as a certain kind of man. South Australia is a significant case study, as it was one of the first Western jurisdictions to attempt to criminalise marital rape. Despite South Australia's generally progressive politics, the legislation was highly contested, and resulted, in the end, only in a partial criminalization. To overcome the strident opposition to rape law reform, we show that supporters explicitly developed a discourse focusing on concepts of sexual normativity and deviance. The marital rapist, it was argued, had deviated from patriarchal standards of masculine decency: this, not the rape itself, was crucial to determining whether his conduct was unlawful.
- Subject
- rape; rape in marriage; rape law reform; sexual assault; marriage; Australia; SDG 16; Sustainable Development Goals
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1469140
- Identifier
- uon:48159
- Identifier
- ISSN:0966-3622
- Language
- eng
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