The Criminalisation of Marital Rape and Law Reform in Canada: A Modest Feminist Success Story in Combatting Marital Rape Myths
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Marital rape is both a product of and a contributing factor to women’s inequality in Canadian society and internationally. Before 1983 in Canada it was legally permissible for a man to rape his wife without criminal sanction. This chapter reviews the struggles surrounding the criminalisation of marital rape in Canada with a view to identifying the arguments, processes and ongoing challenges that may be relevant to other jurisdictions contemplating the shift to criminalising sexual assault in spousal relationships. Part II provides the factual context for the legal analysis, including the prevalence and harms of sexual violence in spousal relationships. Part III outlines the historic rationales for the marital rape immunity, and how these marital rape myths were disputed and dispelled in the law reform efforts that lead to the criminalisation of marital rape in Canada. Parts IV and V examine the legal frameworks applying to marital rape following criminalisation, illustrating the broader doctrinal changes which have been necessary for criminalisation to be implemented in a meaningful way. Despite these reforms, however, marital rape continues to be subject to problematic state (in)action in Canada. Part VI considers arguments and strategies that aim to hold the state to account for ensuring that the criminalisation of marital rape is fully implemented. Part VII concludes with lessons learned from Canada that may be relevant to criminalisation efforts in other jurisdictions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".