Abstract
M.A. (Clinical Psychology)
The institution of marriage rests upon shared expectations of appropriate marital behaviour including those of sexual fidelity and lifetime partnership. Therefore, a wife whose husband has been convicted of rape, experiences a violation in her marriage. The experience of the marital relationship of convicted rapists is not a well-documented phenomenon, particularly from the offenders’ wives’ perspectives. A qualitative, phenomenological approach was adopted to explore the experience and the meanings that participants attributed to the phenomenon of the marital relationship with a convicted rapist. Descriptions of such experiences were sourced from open-ended interviews conducted with three participants. Participant interviews were transcribed and analysed using an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Despite the distinctiveness of the participants’ individual experiences, the researcher identified five superordinate themes common across the three participants’ descriptions. These themes are encapsulated as follows: (a) Wives’ positive experiences of their marital relationship; (b) Wives’ negative experiences of their marital relationship; (c) Wives’ ambivalent experiences in their marital relationship; (d) Wives’ emotional experiences as a consequence of their former husbands’ convictions for rape; and (e) Wives’ experiences of stigmatisation. The findings have potential implications for future research.