On Valentine’s Day, the government announced it would introduce tougher sentences for offenders who kill in the context of sexual violence. This comes three years after the Domestic Abuse Act reaffirmed that consent to rough or violent sex cannot be a defence to murder. Despite this, the “rough sex defence” still leads to offenders receiving more lenient convictions and sentencing.
Official figures on how often the rough sex defence is used are difficult to obtain. But the charity We Can’t Consent to This tracked a ten-fold increase in rough sex claims between 1996 and 2016. They identified more than 60 cases of women being killed by men who attempted to rely on the defence over that period.