What is the Impact of Intimate Partner Sexual Abuse?

"When you're raped by a stranger, you have to live with a frightening nightmare. When you're raped by your husband, you have to live with your rapist."

— Finkelhor & Yllo, License to Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives (1985).

The most pernicious myth about intimate partner sexual abuse is that because the couple is accustomed to having consensual sex, forced sex is not as traumatic as stranger rape. The reality is that rape by the person the victim should most be able to trust is profoundly damaging precisely because of the betrayal of trust.

"The destruction of the ability to trust was the most common long-term effect of rape in marriage that our interviewees mentioned. Marital rape constituted for them not only a sexual assault, but a violation of trust and intimacy. The shock experienced by a woman who was sexually brutalized by the man she had loved and trusted above all others did not wane quickly.

— Finkelhor & Yllo, License to Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives (1985) at 126.

“And they say: marital rape is not as bad as stranger rape. I don’t know. I have never been raped by a stranger. But I think being raped by your husband in your own home must be worse in some ways. When it is the person you have entrusted your life to who abuses you, it isn’t just physical or sexual assault, it is a betrayal of the very core of your marriage, or your person, your trust. If you are not safe in your own home, next to your husband, where are you safe?”

—Mason, L, But he didn’t hit me! (2016) at 92.

The U.S. Department of Justice, Office for Victims of Crime produced a DVD titled Victim Impact: Listen and Learn in which victims speak about the impact of crime on their lives. One victim is named Rebel and her segment is titled “Domestic Violence.” She is a victim of intimate partner sexual abuse, physical violence and death threats. Rebel is a young white woman whose presentation style is controlled, even when relating her husband's threats to have her killed, until she speaks about her emotions and the marital rape. She states:

"He was sexually abusive and I think of all of it that was probably the most painful, and still probably the, the hardest to get past. [Y]ou know, when you're in a relationship with somebody that you love and they use sex forcefully, it's devastating, it's demoralizing….

Emotionally, I just, I can't imagine going out on a date again, or getting into a relationship again. I can't imagine being intimate.

I'm afraid that if I put myself out there, it'll happen again.”

View Rebel's Full Statement

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The perpetual threat to safety that comes from having to live with one's assailant undermines the woman's emotional and physical health. These women are under constant threat whether asleep or awake. Acute, long-term depression, numbing, anxiety and despair are more prevalent in victims of marital rape than in those of stranger rape or physical assault alone.

"It was very clear to me. He raped me. He ripped off my pajamas, he beat me up . . . It emotionally hurt worse [than stranger rape]. I mean you can compartmentalize it as stranger rape—you were at the wrong place at the wrong time. You can manage to get over it differently. But here you're at home with your husband, and you don't expect that. I was under constant terror [from then on] even if he didn't do it."

— Bergen, Wife Rape (1996) at 43.

“Surviving is a strange thing. I am a survivor of emotional and sexual abuse…So many things are still a struggle. Going to bed, getting up, leaving the house, talking to anyone, collecting the kids from school, going to work, phoning someone, doing anything. Some days I am frightened of my own shadow; everything presents danger, I cannot stop shaking, am haunted by constant flashbacks, can’t eat properly, smoke like a chimney, repeat actions, words, sentences over and over in my head.”

—Mason, L, But he didn’t hit me! (2016) at 95.

"In addition to the immediate trauma of marital rape, the victims we talked to reported serious long-term effects. Some were still experiencing them five or ten years after they had divorced their husbands. They talked about an inability to trust. They talked about lingering fear and emotional pain. They talked about terrifying flashbacks and nightmares. They talked about apprehensions about men and sexual dysfunctions—problems that kept them from having a social life, or that interfered with subsequent marriages." 

— Finkelhor & Yllo, License to Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives (1985) at 126.