If you agree to have sex, using a condom, and your partner purposely removes it during sex, have you been raped?
That might sound like a strange question, but in the last few weeks there have been reports about a disturbing practice called “stealthing”. Stealthing is removing a condom before or during sex, generally without a partner’s knowledge – and always without their consent. The practice was recently outlined in an article published in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law. The author Alexandra Brodsky characterises ‘stealthing’ as sexual assault, calling it “rape-adjacent.”
Brodsky believes stealthing to be widespread, although to what extent is hard to judge. Anecdotal evidence — from social media and sexual assault helplines — suggest it certainly happens. She also points to online forums where men share stealthing stories and discuss how best to get away with it.
On the one hand, I’m rarely surprised now by the awfulness of humanity. Sexual violence, in so many forms, is depressingly and seemingly intractably common. On the other, I’m flabbergasted that anyone is prepared to risk their own sexual health even if they don’t give a damn about their partner’s. They should: according to the WHO, more than one million people contract an STI every single day.
Every time you have sex you balance risk and reward. All sex comes with some risk, and as a consequence, it requires a certain level of trust — even a casual hook-up with a stranger.
You trust that he or she has honourable intentions — that your partner is not going to assault you, force you into acts you don’t wish to do, or even steal your stuff before departing.
Women have to deal with more sexual risks than men. Straight, cisgender women face the possibility of pregnancy. They are often smaller, and almost always have less strength than their sexual partners. If my boyfriend, or any of my previous partners, had turned violent on me in bed, there wouldn’t have been a whole lot I could do about it.
The risks are not confined to straight women. Trans women experience sexual and physical violence at much higher rates than cis women. If they are black or mixed race, the risks are even higher. What’s more, the US’s Center for Disease Control found that 44 percent of lesbians and 61 percent of bisexual women have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, compared to 35 percent of heterosexual women.
Both men and women have been victims, as well as perpetrators, of stealthing. The now defunct website I Blast Inside was run by a self-described “raw top” Mark Bentson, an advocate for bareback sex. Bentson’s site included tips for gay men to stealth their partners, including deliberately weakening condoms and adding a lube that looks like cum into a spare condom as “proof” that the stealther used it.
Women have committed similar crimes. This generally doesn’t involve removing the condom, but tampering with it by piercing tiny holes in it beforehand in order to trick a man into fatherhood. This is also known as “spermjacking” and yes, in case you’re wondering, it’s also a form of sexual assault. Whether or not stealthing is seen as rape depends on where in the world you live. Under UK law stealthing is regarded as rape, as it is in Sweden. This is one of the charges facing Wikileak’s Julian Assange. In January this year, a Swiss court convicted a man of rape when the Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne — Switzerland’s highest court — judged that removing a condom without consent amounts to rape.
Clíona Saidléar of Rape Crisis Network Ireland told the magazine Her that stealthing would be defined as an assault under Irish law.
“It’s a very serious offence and people should know that if they think it’s just a bit rude but that it’s innocuous, no – it’s actually a crime in Ireland.” Saidléar said that the RCNI were aware of stealthing and had dealt with cases of it.There is currently no law against stealthing in the US, which make the practice difficult to prosecute. But even in countries where the law clearly defines stealthing as rape, getting a conviction is difficult — perhaps more so than in other cases of rape.
Rape or not – and I don’t think it is negotiable – stealthing is about power and domination. If you remove a condom without consent or tamper with it so that it is no longer effective, you have decided that your needs and desires trump your partner’s. Whether you are straight or gay, a man or a woman, there’s no feasible excuse for this.
Slice it whatever way you like, you’re a predator.