Minimisation of Harm

The concept of ‘violence’ is further complicated by the fact that certain kinds of aggressive behaviours are not thought to be serious. Certain groups of women, for instance, have not been regarded as fully human - they are said to be less sensitive to pain or are ‘naturally promiscuous’ anyway - making it easy to minimise the injury done to them.

Such cognitive distortions have major repercussions, especially in terms of legal retribution. As a general rule, the greater the social distance between aggressors and victims, the lesser the penalty. In the USA, for example, a white man found guilty of rape of a white woman might be imprisoned; a black man in the same circumstances, executed. Immediate justice for African American abusers spared ‘delicate’ white women the agony of testifying in public.

In other instances, some kinds of forced sex are not ‘wrong’ at all. The most egregious example is rape within marriage. The marital rape exemption was only abolished in Scotland in 1989 and in the rest of the UK in 1992. In Europe and the USA, the ‘marital rape exemption’ is attributable to a 1736 ruling by the jurist Sir Matthew Hale. In his words, ‘The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.'^[218] Some proponents of the marital rape exemption alluded to the property implications of dowries: where men pay large dowries to the families of their brides, there was the assumption that they had ‘bought' their wives and therefore had a right to complete authority. Others (such as members of the Partido Accion Nacional in Mexico) contended that marital rape was an oxymoron. In Ghana (where there is still no provision for wives to prosecute their husbands for rape), politicians argued that the proposed law would infringe the ‘sanctity of marriage' and would be ‘anti-Ghanaian'.