A new fight to end marital rape is following on from the Pelicot case

In her recent memoir A Hymn to Life: Shame has to Change Sides, Gisèle Pelicot tells us that when confronted with video evidence of her husband’s rapes, she struggled to recognise herself as the woman on screen. “Her cheek was so floppy, her mouth so limp. She looked like a rag doll.” Gisèle could not even recognise the underwear in which she had been dressed. Her husband, Dominique, had intermittently suggested she buy some flashy lingerie, but she had always ignored these hints.

Once, however, she agreed to accompany him to the lingerie section of the luxury Paris store, Printemps. Of the two underwear sets they considered, they could afford only one. Without her knowledge, Dominique slipped the second into his pocket, only to be caught by security. “‘Madame, you mustn’t be cross with your husband,’ the sales assistant entreated. ‘It’s such a sweet thing to do.’”

Dominique Pelicot had always been able to find people to forgive his crimes, so long as he could present himself as a husband driven by desire for his own wife. We celebrate uxoriousness – and why not? Yet the Pelicot case exposed the persistence of some of the oldest dynamics within heterosexual marriage – not least the presumption of a man’s ownership of his wife’s body. “As the husband had given me permission, in my mind she agreed to it,” said one of the 50 men convicted in 2024 of raping and assaulting Pelicot.

Marital rape is an ancient act, now facilitated by up-to-the-minute technology. In January, former Tory councillor Philip Young pleaded guilty to a string of rape, drugging and voyeurism offences against his wife in a case often termed “the British Pelicot”. One accomplice has pleaded guilty to one charge of rape, one charge of assault by penetration and two charges of sexual assault; four more alleged accomplices will stand trial in October. But it is only the first of several cases expected to hit British courts in the next year. Many, like the Pelicot case, involve forums on which men swap tips on drugging their partners and exchange images. A recent CNN investigation exposed the agility with which such sites dodge legal consequences.

It is about 30 years since British and French parliaments legislated to criminalise marital rape, yet belief in a husband’s entitlement to sex dies hard. This was one of the lessons of an event convened on 17 June and chaired by barrister Helena Kennedy KC under the title “Pelicot Wasn’t An Outlier”. Women’s advocates packed a parliamentary committee room to hear from victims of “drug-facilitated sexual assault”(DFSA), a catch-all term which, as Kennedy’s colleague Mark Stephens pointed out to me, underplays the role that voyeurism and the dissemination of images play in such assaults.

Taking marital rape seriously remains crucial. When Zoe Watts’s then husband turned to Christianity, he decided to confess his sins – first admitting to an affair. Then he told her, “I’ve been using our son’s sleeping medication to put in your last cup of tea at night, to tie you down, take photographs and rape you.” As Watts told attendees at the event, she had at first been more horrified by the affair, “because we had been intimate countless times before”. Later, once she had learned the risk the drugs posed to her body, she was ostracised by friends for failing to forgive her husband over a “domestic” issue. Zoe Watt’s ex-husband was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2022. Or, as another woman of my acquaintance who confided in a friend about her husband’s drug-facilitated rapes was told, “At least it was still you he was shagging.”

Christian churches argued for centuries that a wife’s body was society’s safest vessel for the destructive potential of male sexual desire. One Irish seventh-century code decreed the punishment for bestiality to be a year’s penance – unless the man was unmarried, in which case the need for an outlet was more understandable, and the penance dropped to six months. In one case from 1656, a man was confronted in the act of sodomising a horse. What was he doing, demanded his neighbour, “for he had a wife of his own?”. Neither the consent of wife nor horse was relevant.

Kennedy’s event focused on legal remedies to DFSA. The cultural issue, however, is how we view marriage and cohabitation: a partnership of equals or a contract for servicing male desire? Marriage must remain more than a transaction by which women trade access to their bodies to retain a father for their children. Surrender this principle, and we return to a world in which, in marriage at least, women’s consent is once again brutally subordinated to male desire.

Photograph by Vincent Koebel/NurPhoto via Getty Images