Yes. Being married to someone, living with them, or having had consensual sex with them before, none of that creates ongoing consent. Consent has to be given every time, for that specific act, by someone who is free and able to choose. If it isn’t there, whatever the relationship, the law treats it the same way.
This wasn’t always the law, but it has been for a long time now
Before 1991, English law worked on the assumption that marriage itself gave a wife’s irrevocable consent to her husband, meaning a husband could not, in law, be found guilty of raping his wife. That changed with the House of Lords decision in R v R in 1991, which abolished that assumption entirely, later confirmed in legislation through the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
There is no separate, lesser offence called “marital rape” today. It’s prosecuted under section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the exact same law and the exact same maximum sentence, life imprisonment, as any other rape.
What consent actually means in law
Section 74 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 defines consent as agreement by choice, made by someone who has both the freedom and the capacity to make that choice. A few things follow directly from that:
- Consent has to exist at the time of the act. Agreeing yesterday, or five minutes ago, isn’t the same as agreeing now.
- It can be withdrawn at any point, including partway through. If you say stop and it continues, that can be rape.
- Agreeing to one act isn’t agreeing to another.
- Someone who is asleep, unconscious, or too intoxicated to choose freely cannot consent, whatever they may have agreed to earlier.
None of this changes depending on whether you’re married, dating, living together, separated, or divorced. The law asks the same question in every case: was there free, informed agreement, at the time.
If you’re not sure whether what happened to you counts
That uncertainty is common, and it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that it doesn’t matter. Sexual pressure and coercion inside a relationship often doesn’t look like what people expect abuse to look like from the outside, which is part of what makes it so hard to name at the time.
You don’t need to have a definitive legal label for something before it’s worth taking seriously, getting support for, or, if you choose to, reporting.
For more on your options and how to access support, our guides set out the practical next steps.