“Sex” with your comatose wife = rape

Hard to know where to begin with a headline like this:

Set aside for a moment the classic journalistic mistake of confusing “sex” with “rape.” Here’s what this story is about:

Police who videotaped a man having sex with his comatose wife in her nursing home room violated his constitutional rights, an appeals court ruled Thursday.

David W. Johnson, 59, had an expectation to privacy when he visited his wife, a stroke victim, at Divine Savior Nursing Home in Portage, the District 4 Court of Appeals ruled. Therefore, police violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches when they installed a hidden video camera in the room, the court said.

The court ruled that taping the incident with a hidden camera was a violation of the man’s Fourth Amendment rights (which protect against unreasonable search and seizure). I gotta wonder, if the nursing home staff suspected this man was raping his wife, couldn’t they have performed medical tests on her to determine as much? It seems like installing a hidden camera was not the smartest way to go about this.

Ok, now back to that problematic headline. (Other papers wrote even more appalling versions.) A person in a coma is unable to consent to sex, no matter what her marital status. The framing of this story only serves to reinforce the notion that non-consensual sex in the context of marriage is just sex, not rape. Did Phyllis Schlafly write this headline? The stats: 1.5 million American women are raped or sexually abused every year by an intimate partner. Establishing that husbands do not legally have a right to sex with their wives whenever and whenever they want it was one of feminism’s hard-won battles in the U.S. (one that’s ongoing in other parts of the world). In some ways, this article is a perfect example of why it can be so hard to get society to acknowledge that this situation rape: This woman no doubt consented to sex with her husband earlier in their relationship, but that’s no longer relevant. Now that she’s in a coma, she is unable to consent. This is why we fight so hard to keep information about rape victims’ previous sexual encounters out of the courtroom: Because consent on Monday does not mean it wasn’t rape on Tuesday.

This article also raised questions for me about whether spouses/families receive any kind of information or training about what kind of contact is appropriate with a family member who’s in a coma. Anyone know?

Ophelia and Renee have more.