'Rough Sex' and the Criminal Law

Hannah Bows is Associate Professor in Criminal Law at Durham University, UK. Her research focuses on different forms of violence against women, including domestic violence, sexual violence and homicide, and crimes against, and by, older adults.Jonathan Herring is the DW Wolf-Clarendon Fellow in Law at Exeter College and Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, UK. He has written extensively on issues around family law, medical law and ethics, care law, and criminal law.

• Introduction; Hannah Bows and Jonathan HerringChapter 1. Consensual Aggression and Violence During Sex (‘rough sex’) in the General Population – A Scoping (Literature) Review; Bernard Gallagher, Nadia Wager, Victoria Gall, Barbara Gilroy, Lara Flynn Hudspith, Manisha Singh, Joseph Sykes, and Vicky Whitaker Chapter 2. Coercive Control and Rough Sex; Jonathan Herring Chapter 3. Defining rough sex via mainstream pornography; Samantha Keene Chapter 4. BDSM and the legal imaginary; Alexandra Fanghanel Chapter 5. The Legality of Love-bites; Amanda Spalding Chapter 6. Effectively Recognising and Punishing Sexual Coercion: Proposals for Reform; Susan Leahy Chapter 7. A Critique of the ‘Rough Sex Defence’ in Australian Rape Law; Rachael Burgin and Jonathan Crowe Chapter 8. Understanding women’s experiences of non-consensual violence in sex; Lucy Snow Chapter 9. The rough sex defence in the UK; Fiona Mackenzie Chapter 10. Reacting to Rough Sex: The Unexpected Toll of Section 71 Domestic Abuse Act 2021; Emily Bradley Chapter 11. On Sadism: Placing the Rough Sex Defence Within a History of Sadistic Conceptualisation; Ray Harris