Women's rights, men's rights, human rights: discourses of rights and rape in marriage in 1970s and 1980s Australia

While there was significant public support for most of the changes to rape laws in Australian jurisdictions in the 1970s and 1980s, the criminalising of marital rape remained contentious. This article explores the arguments for and against reformers' attempts to remove the immunity from prosecution given to a husband who had non-consensual sex with his wife, with a focus on 'rights'- based discourses. Discourses of rights, whether imagined as specific to one group or more broadly as 'human rights', were one way to argue for equality in society and within the law. This article argues that the call to rights, particularly human rights, did not have a strong public appeal. Instead, the public responded to the problem of marital rape when it was individualised. There was a keen interest in the direct stories of victims publicised in the media, which were far more persuasive than a universalised discourse of rights. Public narratives of suffering from a woman needing protection from a violent husband proved a powerful impetus to social and legal change, leading to the criminalisation of marital rape in all Australian jurisdictions by 1992