Criminalizing rape within marriage: Perspectives of ghanaian university students

Forcing sexual intercourse on an unwilling marital partner, or marital rape, is not a crime in many societies around the world, because of a marital exemption rule that prohibits the prosecution of husbands who rape their wives. Concurrently, marital rape is one of the least studied phenomena in sexual violence research. This is particularly true for societies in the non-Western world. The current study examined the general attitudes of a sample of university students in Ghana, a West African country, toward marital rape. Respondents were also asked whether an ongoing legislative effort to criminalize marital rape in the country was warranted. The results indicated strong opposition toward criminalization. The results also indicated no marked differences between male and female respondents in attitudes toward marital rape and the need for a legislative response to the phenomenon. Patriarchal ideologies such as wifely submission to the husband and an implicit duty to provide sex in marriage provided some of the justifications furnished for why marital rape should remain noncriminalized. Advocates of criminalization mentioned the social, physical, and psychological effects of rape and how the enactment of marital rape legislation and the imposition of severe criminal sanctions would help prevent the incidence of marital rape and other forms of violence against women in the society.