Opinion: Why is it still legal to rape your spouse in Maryland? – Maryland Matters

By Chris Apple

The author is a volunteer advocate.

Sexual assault must be unlawful, and marriage must be no protection — it’s a really perfect the U.S. has been working towards for the reason that Nineteen Seventies, when states started outlawing marital rape. In Maryland, loopholes nonetheless exist that allow individuals get away with assaulting their spouses. Luckily, efforts to shut these loopholes are intensifying.

Within the February Zoom listening to about this proposed repeal, faces had been somber. Advocates talked in regards to the grotesque methods individuals have discovered to take advantage of these loopholes. Below present Maryland state regulation, marriage is a complete protection to fourth-degree sexual assault — even when the partner is injured of their intimate areas, even when the contact is abusive, even when the married couple reside aside in a trial separation.

Extra excessive assault, together with rape, is permitted if the partner is incapacitated. Advocates went into painful element about instances the place spouses had been unconscious, typically drugged. To be thought-about sexual assault, the assailant should use or threaten drive, or the sufferer should explicitly withdraw consent. However below Maryland regulation, an incapacitated particular person has not withdrawn consent, and the assault doesn’t meet the authorized definition of drive as a result of the sufferer was unconscious.

All of those are actual instances shared by state’s attorneys who tried to prosecute these crimes, solely to seek out that the perpetrators hadn’t finished something unlawful. These survivors, probably going through ridicule and threats for going public, didn’t get the justice they deserved.

However they might have gotten that justice in the event that they had been single. Solely the legal guidelines for married individuals have these loopholes. If these survivors hadn’t been married, if it was an intimate associate who did these items to them, it will have met the definition of sexual assault. The very same acts, perpetrated between single individuals, are crimes in Maryland.

The trouble to repeal these loopholes has been occurring for a number of years. At its core is the worth we place on consent and a repudiation of the notion that marriage itself grants that consent. Within the time earlier than the founding of the U.S., the regulation held that males assumed management over the authorized rights of their wives. “The husband can’t be responsible of a rape dedicated by himself upon his lawful spouse,” wrote English decide Sir Matthew Hale, “for by their mutual consent and contract the spouse hath given up herself on this sort unto her husband, which she can not retract.”

These legal guidelines fashioned the premise for our authorized system. However extra not too long ago, we as a society have spent many years combating marital rape legal guidelines, combating for the best that married individuals have the identical proper to bodily autonomy as everyone else. By repealing these loopholes, Maryland can get nearer to that very best.

The 2022 repeal try finally failed. It has now failed 4 years in a row, actually because amendments had been added to the invoice that weakened the protections it hoped to supply. Advocates have pledged to return and struggle once more in 2023. And now, a grass-roots petition has begun circulating, demanding a direct repeal to those loopholes. 

On the streets, individuals categorical shock and disgust once they study this regulation. “We’re one among these states?” exclaimed one petition signer. And as circulators went door-to-door, signers started to share their very own tales: repeated assaults by intimate companions, members of the family, neighbors. Assaults at nighttime, whereas the sufferer was exhausted and delirious. A few of these tales echoed these shared by the state’s attorneys, hinting on the plain reality that marital assaults are rather more widespread than what we see in that listening to room. As many as two-thirds of sexual assaults are by no means reported.

The petition’s circulators goal to gather as many signatures as doable, and can ship it to Maryland lawmakers upfront of the 2023 repeal listening to for this regulation. Maryland voters can learn and signal the petition at mdspousal.com.

Marriage doesn’t change how consent works. A spouse isn’t the bodily property of her husband, and married individuals want the identical sexual assault protections as everyone else. Present Maryland regulation takes away a partner’s proper to consent — it mandates their consent, whether or not they’re really prepared or not. It’s time to lastly change that.