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.

This dissertation attempts to find out what associations exist between dysfunctional parental relationships in the childhood of rapists and the rapists' violent acts. It also briefly examines the sociocultural effects which nurture such relationships. Rape, a crime very prevalent in our society today, is now perceived as an acute expression of men's contempt for and anger against women. The former interpretation of rape as primarily a sexually motivated crime is no longer popular. This dissertation attempts to trace the origin of the rapist's psyche from his dysfunctional parental relationships. Rare data on rapist's family relations from a recent FBI survey on 41 serial rapists provided the empirical base for this dissertation. In order to enlarge the sample size for this dissertation, relevant information was extracted from an additional 31 rapists' case histories through content analysis and added to the FBI study. These 31 case histories were drawn from three different sources. Information about the rapists' dominant parental figures and the rapists' positive and negative parental relationships were extracted and tabulated in three separate tables. Relevant information drawn from one additional source was also incorporated into the tables. These three tables were used to clarify the nature of the rapists' parental relationships. In addition, 18 case histories selected from the 31 case histories mentioned above were analyzed in order to show, in more detail, the nature of the rapist's negative parental relationship and its role in the creation of the rapist psyche. The combined result of the FBI study and the 31 case histories, the analysis of the 18 case histories, and information from other sources suggest a strong correlation between the rapists' negative parental relationships and their crime of rape. The data on the rapists were compared to survey responses by 41 imprisoned felons, not convicted of a sexual offense, and by 150 male university students. The comparison revealed important differences in the family relations of the rapists and the other two groups. Our society's self-abusive, aspiritual cultural tendency was briefly examined as the basic influential force in creating negative parental relationships.