Normative and International Human Rights Law Imperatives for Criminalizing Intimate Partner Sexual Violence: The Marital Rape Impunity in Comparative and Historical Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this third chapter of the book, The Right to Say No, Marital Rape and Law Reform in Canada, Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, (Hart, 2017) we provide a big-picture perspective on the long and bumpy road taken by many of the world’s countries in moving towards legal recognition that sexual assault can occur in a marital relationship and in the provision of a criminal law remedy for this form of gendered violence. We begin the chapter by articulating our arguments about why engaging the power of criminal remedies is necessary to the struggle to end sexual violence against women in marriage, particularly with reference to criminal law’s importance in expressing fundamental social norms. Section II moves to a critical review of the historical origins and ideological justifications underpinning the marital rape exemption in diverse societies. We show how similar themes occur across very different social regimes. This is followed in section III by a global, comparative analysis of the marital rape exemption and the criminalisation of marital rape in various countries of the world. We provide an overview of the historical and uneven progress towards providing criminal legal remedies for women sexually assaulted by their husbands or intimate partners in different legal systems around the world. In this section we also analyse and critique the two most comprehensive and recent databases of marital rape legislation around the world, provided by the World Bank and the United Nations, respectively. Section IV provides an overview of the major human rights instruments and sources of legal authority that require states to criminalise sexual assault in marriage, including the instruments aimed at securing women’s equal rights and ending gendered violence. Our central argument is that international human rights law and the due-diligence standard provide powerful normative bases on which women’s movements and other social justice supporters can organise to end impunity for sexual violence in intimate relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".