'But if you can't rape your wife, who can you rape?' toward a course-of-conduct offence centring partner sexual coercion in Canada

Thesis

Despite the removal of the marital exemption to rape 40 years ago in Canada, the law still fails to treat partner sexual assault on par with other sexual assaults. Starting from the norm of stranger rape, it struggles to make sense of partner sexual violence in a culture that normalizes sexually coercive behaviours. Because partner sexual violence presents a serious empirical, social, and legal problem, it deserves to receive primary consideration and should not be treated by legal scholars as a mere exception to the stranger rape model. This process of ‘centring’ partner sexual violence enables me to identify a gap in the law and propose new avenues to address chronic and non-physically forced sexual violence.

Noting that the stranger rape model presupposes a unique interaction between victim and offender, I work by analogy with coercive control to criticize the ‘incident model’ of sexual assault. I work ‘bottom-up’ from the empirical reality of partner sexual violence to propose creating course-of-conduct provisions criminalizing repeatedly engaging in pre-defined acts of sexual coercion. Developing criminal provisions that are behaviourally specific and that do not require proving non-consent (among other features) produces a strategy that could pre-empt the implementation problems that plague the legal response to partner sexual violence.

Beyond its exploration of concrete legal reform possibilities, my work contributes to the sexual violence field by focusing on the context of intimate relationships, which is often neglected by legal scholarship. My research confronts the injustices still faced by victims of partner sexual violence and opens up new ways of thinking about legal responses to sexual violations.

Authors: Zaccour, S

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: coercive control; sexual violence; sexual coercion; criminal law; domestic violence; Canada; violence against women; Canadian law; partner sexual violence; sexual assault
• Subjects: Gender-based violence; Criminal liability; Marital violence; Intimate partner violence; Rape