TWO politicians in the US have put the call out for ‘stealthing’, the act of removing a condom during sex without consent, to be classified as rape under the law.

Democratic Representatives Ro Khanna and Carolyn Maloney, sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee requesting a hearing regarding the creation of legislation surrounding stealthing.

The act of stealthing gained attention in April this year, after a study published in America’s Columbia Law and Medical Journal revealed the widespread nature of this disturbing trend.

Author of the study Alexandra Brodsky argued that the act of secretly removing a condom during sex should be treated as a form of sexual assault.

In the letter Khanna and Maloney outline the detrimental physical and psysological effects that stealthing can have on the victim, highlighting the need for it to be defined under the law.

“Recent legal and academic articles have considered how nonconsensual condom removal could infract turn consensual sex into nonconsensual sex by way of different legal mechanisms,” the letter read.

“Stealthing can lead to lasting consequences, such as unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, and is also a violation of trust and dignity between two sexual partners.”

.@RoKhanna (D-CA) and @RepMaloney (D-NY) request hearing for policy response/legislation to "stealthing," which sure seems like a crime pic.twitter.com/N0NrMZue6g — Jeff Stein (@JStein_Vox) 4 October 2017

The letter states that the hearing would also give Members of Congress the opportunity to learn more about this increasingly prevalent issue.

“Consent is not up for discussion, it is a requirement for the entirety of any sexual interaction. Stealthing violates an agreement between partners and is a dangerous form of sexual assault,” Khanna said in a statement.

“The implications of the practice of nonconsensual condom removal are far-reaching with respect to the ongoing national conversation on the definition of consensual sex.”

This isn’t the first time that US politicians have tried to take action against this issue. Government officials from Wisconsin and California have previously tried to introduce bills that would allow stealthing to come under the legal definition of rape but did not receive enough votes to see it through.

“I am horrified that we even need to be having this conversation, that a sexual partner would violate their partner’s trust and consent like this. Stealthing is sexual assault,” Maloney said in a statement.

“We need a hearing so that Congress can hear from the experts about how to best address this issue as we continue to amend our country’s and universities’ responses to sexual assault and rape.”

AUSTRALIAN LAW

At this stage there is no specific legal process in place to deal with stealthing under Australian law, making it a legal grey area.

Triple J’s program Hack did a series of reports on the issue of stealthing in Australia after Brodsky’s study gained international attention, gathering first hand experiences from both victims and perpetrators of the act.

NSW Law Society President Pauline Wright told Triple J that stealthing could be considered sexual assault as it removes consent from the situation.

“Removing a condom after there’s been a prior agreement that a condom is going to be used, basically undoes that agreement. Because there is no consent,” she said.

“If a man obtains consent by saying, ‘look if you do have sex with me I’ll wear a condom’, but always intended that he was going to take it off, then he’s obtained that consent by fraud, and that is going to amount to an offence in NSW, because it’s clearly undoing the consent.”

But because no case has been through the court yet there is no telling what the outcome would be.

“The sexual offences legislation differs across each state and territory, but there’s nothing specific in any of the current legislation that says removing a condom without consent is expressly against the law,” said UNSW Criminology Lecturer Dr Bianca Fileborn.

“It would depend on a case going to court and particular facts and circumstances of that case.”