Assessing the Prevalence of Marital Rape

The small literature on marital rape has placed much theoretical weight on the generalization that marital rape rarely occurs within otherwise nonviolent marriages. However, most existing estimates of the prevalence of marital rape have been essentially by-products of research on other problems, without having directly sought marital rape victims per se. Employing an unusually wide range of case-finding strategies to identify marital rape victims, this study does also sustain that central generalization and critically explores several of its varied implications.