Lawyers Manual - Unified Court System

Intimate Partner Sexual Violence
12
When Domestic Violence Victims Are Sexually
Assaulted: Meeting the Challenges
by Jill Laurie Goodman
Sexual assault is often woven into the fabric of the abuse batterers visit on
their wives and ex-wives, their lovers and ex-lovers, and the mothers of their
children. Batterers use rape and sexual abuse to maintain power and control
through the humiliation and fear it instills in their victims. They also rape
because they can — because the power and control they have achieved allows
them to act on their sexual impulses and proclivities without reference to their
partners’ willingness to participate or in the face of active resistance. Just as
rape is a potent weapon in war, so it is a powerful tool in intimate relations.
Ambivalence about rape in general, and intimate partner rape in particular,
stymies efforts to help victims. While our legal system has had no trouble
treating rape as a serious crime — rapists were executed in this country well
into the second half of the twentieth century1 — victims have been, and often
still are, treated with suspicion and contempt. Until recently, that ambivalence
was written into statutes themselves. In New York, within recent memory —
certainly during the lifetimes and even the legal careers of senior prosecutors
and judges — victims’ accounts were considered so inherently untrustworthy
that every single element of the crime of rape, including identification,
penetration, and resistance, had to be corroborated by some evidence besides the
victim’s word. 2 Not until 1974 did the New York legislature eliminate the bulk
of these onerous corroboration requirements. 3 So crippling was the evidentiary
burden in rape cases that in the early 1970’s New York courts typically
convicted only eighteen defendants of rape a year. 4
Another decade passed before inroads were made in the statutory exemption
that allowed men who raped their wives to escape criminal penalties, and then