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Naffine, Ngaire --- "‘Some gentle violence’: marital rape immunity as contradiction in criminal law" [2019] ELECD 110; in West, Robin; Bowman, G. Cynthia (eds), "Research Handbook on Feminist Jurisprudence" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) 231

Book Title: Research Handbook on Feminist Jurisprudence

Editor(s): West, Robin; Bowman, G. Cynthia

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781786439680

Section: Chapter 12

Section Title: ‘Some gentle violence’: marital rape immunity as contradiction in criminal law

Author(s): Naffine, Ngaire

Number of pages: 17

Abstract/Description:

At the center of criminal legal doctrine is a contradiction still unacknowledged by influential theorists. Criminal law, criminal jurists and scholars have accepted and sometimes even counseled rape of a wife as a means of securing domestic order, while at the same time describing rape as the worst thing that can be done to a person short of murder. Rape has been condemned outright and absolutely; yet, at the same time, the highly qualified nature of the crime has been either tacitly accepted or openly endorsed. I call this ‘The Contradiction’ of criminal law. This chapter examines the nature of this faulty logic and how it has been obfuscated by mainstream scholars. It also considers the remarkable variety of ways in which feminists from law and adjacent disciplines have exposed these problems of impaired legal reasoning at the center of criminal law.