ABSTRACT
Further, while husband and wife have for some time been competent and compellable witnesses against each other in most criminal cases, until the case of R v R [1992] 1 AC 599, the state of consortium meant that sexual intercourse within marriage could never be rape, regardless of the wife’s consent on a particular occasion, or lack of it. This was the case in which the House of Lords officially recognised that marriage was ‘in modern times regarded as a partnership of equals and no longer one in which the wife must be the subservient chattel of the husband’. For those interested in this discrete topic, the Law Commission Paper No 116, Rape Within Marriage (1990), provides an excellent review of marital rape in UK and non-UK jurisdictions.
