Rape immunity ‘ludicrous’

Press, 2 March 1984, Page 9

Rape immunity ‘ludicrous’

PA Wellington Women’s refuge representatives has told a Parliamentary select committee that allowing spousal immunity from rape was a denial that women were raped by their partners. The proposals in the Rape Law Reform Bill would, if implemented, see the ludicrous situation of a married woman being charged with raping her husband while the married male continued to be unaccountable, said the National Collective of Independent Women’s Refuges. Under the bill no person shall be convicted of rape in respect of sexual intercourse with his wife unless they are living apart at the time in separate residences. In submissions to the Statutes Revision Committee studying the bill, the collective said a rape survey conducted by refuges in September, 1982, showed that almost 50 per cent of women who stayed in refuges identified rape and sexual violence in their domestic situation. The incidence of sexual violence against children was also disturbingly high.

The collective believed the actual figures to be much higher. “We are therefore adamant that these women and children must be given the protection they deserve and that this clause be deleted from this bill and from the principal act.” The Society for the Promotion of Community Standards told the committee that if Parliament wanted to reduce the incidence of rape, it was not enough to make imprisonment a mandatory penalty. “Parliament must take steps to reduce the flow of pornographic material, which arouses the base passions that lead people to commit rape,” it said. If rape within marriage was declared a criminal offence, the position of the married woman, who had in principle consented to sexual intercourse, was put on equal standing with that of the unmarried woman, who had given no such consent. “This would weaken the institution of marriage, destroying spousal immunity,” the submission said. ;!Uie Zonta Club of Wellington told the committee in its submissions that com-

plainants should have the right to have the accused excluded from the court while giving evidence and being cross-examined, and that the complainant’s evidence be presented to the accused in the form of a tape-recording or written form. “The adoption of this procedure would alleviate the distress which is experienced by the majority of complainants when giving evidence and being crossexamined in the presence of the accused,” the club said. Earlier, the Society for Research on Women (5.R.0.W.) told the committee it did not support the mandatory exclusions of the public from the court proceedings. It believed the justice should not only be done but be seen to be done, it said in its submissions. A Dunedin lawyer, Mr John O’Neill, urged that the definition of rape be left as it is in the present law, “the act of a male person having sexual intercourse with a woman or child.” Defining the acts would lay the ground for altering the law to provide for the lawfulness of homosexual acts between male adults.