Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 14, 1993 TAG: 9311140076
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Marital rape cases are even more difficult to prosecute than other rape cases, they said, largely because the public still finds the concept of marital rape to be inherently contradictory.
"In many states, married women still don't have equal protection under the law," said Kersti Yllo, a sociologist and co-author of "License To Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives." Changes, she said, have to be made in the fundamental way that many people still view marriage.
Moreover, the shadow cast when Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband's penis even further obscured the charge that the jury in Manassas had to consider during John Bobbitt's trial last week.
Elizabeth M. Schneider, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, said the prosecution's linking of the marital assault charge against John Bobbitt with the charge of malicious wounding against Lorena Bobbitt, for which she will be tried later this month, was both bizarre and troubling.
"Jurors could have believed that if they found him guilty of marital sexual assault that they would support her view that she was justified in her action," Schneider said.
And, she said, because Lorena Bobbitt testified that she attacked her husband in response to being attacked by him, "jurors were only able to assess his actions by whether they found hers to be justifiable."
Julie Blackman, a social psychologist and forensic consultant, said that Bobbitt's wound made his conviction less likely. Even if the jury believed that he had raped his wife, she said, they may have found him not guilty because they felt she had already sufficiently punished him.
But, she said, Lorena Bobbitt faces special challenges in convincing the jurors who will decide her case that her response was justifiable. In part, she said, this is because publicity about battered women has become so pervasive in recent years.
"On the witness stand they are being held to a higher standard," she said. "Prosecutors are saying, `So you were battered, but we have shelters, we have alternatives, why didn't you seek them out?' "
Indeed, Lorena Bobbitt sought a restraining order against her husband two days before the episode, but she did not return to court to complete the paperwork.
"The justification slope for women striking back has gotten steeper and more slippery," said Blackman.
Schneider agreed, saying that a woman's credibility is perceived as shakier in a case of marital rape. "Even if she had not done what she did, an isolated example of marital rape without a larger context of a violent marriage is likely to provoke disbelief," said Schneider.
Indeed one juror, William P. Vogt, remarked that the case would have been stronger if, as he put it, "someone had heard her scream, or if there had been some sort of bruising, that would have been more substantive evidence."
Although all 50 states now criminalize forced sex between a husband and wife, the majority, including Virginia, place restrictions on the definition of the crime. Because the Bobbitts lived together, for example, he was charged with marital sexual assault; if they had lived apart, he would have been charged with rape.
Restrictions in other states include requirements for a weapon to have been used, for married women to report the crime within a short period of time, or for the sentence to be less severe.
Yllo, the sociologist, estimated that rape occurs in about 10 percent of American marriages. But while she applauded the social statement made by the criminalizing of rape within a marriage, she said that "it is not a problem that can necessarily be solved by the criminal justice system."
Counselors who work with battered women attest that the women themselves have a difficult time believing that sexual abuse is a kind of domestic violence and that they have an even harder time talking about it.
"They are so ashamed," said Jill Abernathey, a counselor at the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, Minn., who said that more than three-quarters of the women she counsels ultimately admit to having been sexually abused by a partner. "They want to satisfy him, so they give in. Men always tell them, `If I don't get it here, I'll go somewhere else for it.' "
Increasingly, said legal observers, women are having a more difficult time proving that striking back against a husband or boyfriend was self-defense, not vindictive retaliation. The international furor over Lorena Bobbitt's cutting of her husband's penis following what she said was rape, they said, is in line with the uproar over the 1991 film "Thelma and Louise," in which female characters shoot at men who rape and sexually upbraid the women.
But in the film, Thelma and Louise shot at strangers; by cutting her husband, Lorena Bobbitt struck at primal male fears that the women with whom they are intimate will emasculate them.
Indeed, so common is the fear that Florence King, the National Review columnist who lives near Manassas, disparaged Lorena Bobbitt's action as unimaginative. "If you do it psychologically, it's so much more fun," said the professional misanthrope, who declared that she was heartily sick of the couple.
by CNB