National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape (NCMDR) was founded in 1980 as a project of the Women’s History Research Center (WHRC) in order to document rape laws in the United States that entitled men to rape their wives and dates. It was a network of academic researchers; law interns; health, mental health, and religious professionals; prosecutors; defense attorneys; judges; and activists from the anti-rape and battered women’s movements and especially of victims or survivors. Laura X, the founder and director, as an individual, campaigned successfully for the repeal of date and marital rape exemptions from prosecution, which were in the laws of 45 states, in federal and military law, in laws of Guam, as well as in the laws of 20 other countries, from 1978 through June 1993 for the United States, and until 2004 elsewhere, when she retired and closed NCMDR.

When Laura X started collecting materials in 1968 for what would become in 1970 the Women’s History Library of the WHRC, one goal was to create an activists-shared archive for materials growing out of the emerging women’s liberation movement. Operating out of her Berkeley, California, home, the formerly battered woman and University of California, Berkeley, alumna, harbored battered women and rape survivors who were in desperate straits because there were still no community services available to them. From this refuge, Laura printed interviews with survivors in her own publication SPAZM (the only national women’s liberation newsletter from April to December 1969) as well as printed “Anatomy of a Rape” on July 23 in the newspaper she copublished in 1970 (It Ain’t Me, Babe, the first newspaper of the women’s liberation movement). She published the first rape bibliography and an entire reel of microfilm on rape by 1974 as part of the WHRC Women and Law collection. This research was used for several subsequent best-selling books on rape.

In 1975, Laura X learned from prominent feminist Diana Russell that rape was still legal within marriage in most places in the United States. That same year, she worked to publicize the words of the judge who presided in the trial of Judy Hartwell, a battered woman who had killed her husband. The judge in the case validated Hartwell’s right to say no and to defend herself, even though marital rape was not yet a crime.

In December 1978, Laura X assisted a rape crisis center involved in the trial of John Rideout in Salem, Oregon, which was the first time in the United States a husband was tried for raping his wife while they were living together. This electrified and polarized the country. Rideout was acquitted, a verdict which motivated Laura to lead the successful campaign to make marital rape a crime in California.

From 1980, 44 state-by-state campaigns included research; newspaper and magazine articles; well over 300 high school, college, and law school campuses; TV and radio appearances; and activist involvement in court cases. Articles appeared in USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Television appearances included 60 Minutes, Donahue, Sally Jessy Rafael, Geraldo, The Today Show, and Mark Wahlberg. NCMDR also assisted the Montel Williams and Oprah shows.

Major court decisions that used NCMDR work include the following: Smith in Florida, 1981; Morrison in New Jersey, 1982; Rider in Florida, 1984; Liberta in New York, 1984; Warren in Georgia, 1985; and Bobbitt in Virginia, 1994. In the precedent-setting Liberta decision, by Judge Sol Wachtler of New York’s highest court, the exemption for husbands from rape prosecution when they raped their wives was struck down as an unconstitutional denial of equal protection, privacy, and bodily integrity.

After helping the New York County Lawyers Association produce the first forum on marital rape in February of 1980, NCMDR provided seminars for the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault, the National Conference of Women and the Law, the Association of Women in Psychology, and local agencies around the country and Canada. In 1983 and 1984, NCMDR coproduced the world’s first conferences on marital rape in St. Louis, Missouri, and Des Moines, Iowa. Laura X served with Surgeon General C. Everett Koop on his 1985 National Task Force on Violence as a Public Health Issue.

NCMDR published on an ongoing basis the State Law Chart, a reference summary of marital rape exemptions for each state, and a prosecution statistics chart, as well as pamphlets on the Rideout trial and wives who were forced to kill their rapists in selfdefense. This research was used by most law article and book authors on the topic.

NCMDR also expanded its activities to the international level with campaigns in Ireland, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Mexico, and China (the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995), including a successful legislative reversal of a Mexico Supreme Court decision in 1997, which allowed marital rape as the “undue exercise of a right” upon a spouse.

NCMDR’s highest reward came at the 1995 UN Women’s Rights Conference in Beijing, when all voting delegates, many of them men, supported wives’ rights to enjoy intimacy, only if by mutual consent.

Bibliography:

Drucker, D. (1979, Spring). The common law does not support a marital exception for forcible rape. Women’s Rights Law Reporter, 5(2–3), 181–200.
Harmes, R. (1999). Marital rape: A selected bibliography. Violence Against Women, 5, 1082–1083. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/vaw/5/9
People v. Liberta. (1984). 64 N. Y. 2d 152, 474 N.E.2d 567,485 N.Y.S.2d 207. Retrieved May 30, 2017, from http://faculty.law.miami.edu/zfenton/documents/Peoplev.Liberta.pdf
X, L. (1994). A brief series of anecdotes about the backlash experienced by those of us working on marital and date rape. Journal of Sex Research, 31(2), 151–153.
X, L. (1999). Accomplishing the impossible: An advocate’s notes from the successful campaign to make marital and date rape a crime in all 50 U.S.states and other countries. Violence Against Women, 5, 1064–1081. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/vaw/5/9
X, L., & Peterson, E. (1995, December 10). When husbands rape: Cases of ‘“soul murder” [Opinion]. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/10/opinion/l-when-husbands-rape-cases-of-soul-murder-000060.html
National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape: https://ncmdr.org/

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