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Civil law imposes regular sexual relations on married couples when the Penal Code punishes rape between spouses. A paradox that is less and less tenable.
By Nicholas Bastuck
“Should the law tolerate and encourage consensual sexual relations with reluctance or experienced as an obligation? No”, replies Julie Mattiussi, lecturer at the University of Haute-Alsace.© CHRISTIAN BEUTLER / MAXPPP / KEYSTONE / MAXPPP
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On believed it to be placed in the radius of judicial old stuff, such as the repression of abortion or the offense of adultery. It is not so. The #MeToo wave has passed, but marital duty resists. Permanently refusing to sleep with one’s husband – or wife – always constitutes, in the eyes of certain judges, “a serious violation of the obligations of marriage”. Far from the current debates on consent, sexual freedom, the right to dispose of one’s body, this principle inherited from canon law, which forces the married couple to regular intercourse – provided that their pace is not frenetic, that they remain in a certain “normality”, and that the age and health of the partners allow it – is still summoned to the courtrooms.
Convictions for this reason are increasingly rare…
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