About 19 per cent of 1063 men who have had sex with men surveyed had been stealthed. Loading Under Victorian law the non-consensual removal of a condom and continued penetrative sex is classified as a sexual assault, but there is nothing in the Crimes Act in Victoria that explicitly states stealthing is a crime. Last week The Age reported that a prominent surgeon, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had been charged with raping a fellow male doctor after he allegedly removed a condom without permission. The surgeon was arrested and charged with one count of rape and one count of sexual assault over the alleged incident which occurred in Victoria in 2017.

He initially had his practising licence suspended, but it was restored after a battle in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. The Medical Board is appealing the decision in the Supreme Court. Dr Brianna Chesser, a senior lecturer in criminology and justice at RMIT who co-wrote an academic article on stealthing last year, believes the case could set a legal precedent. "As the law currently stands, stealthing has not yet come before the scrutiny of the courts,

and the existing legislation does not expressly reference the legality of non-consensual condom removal," she said. Dr Chesser said but there was nothing specific in any state or territory's sexual offences legislation that says removing a condom without consent is illegal. "At the moment [stealthing] doesn't quite fit into the current definition of consent," Dr Chesser said.

"What we need is a common law that clearly stipulates that stealthing is an instance where a crime has occurred because a person has consented to sexual intercourse in a set of circumstances that changes into a situation that they do not consent to." Loading The study's lead researcher, Rosie Latimer, a PhD candidate at Monash University, decided to investigate rates of non-consensual condom removal in Melbourne following a 2017 study from Yale Law School, which noted a surge in cases of stealthing and linked it to a disturbing trend of gender-motivated sexual violence. "Technically in Australia it's not explicitly in the law that [stealthing] is sexual assault so it's not specifically written in statutory or common law," Ms Latimer said. Those who had experienced stealthing were three times less likely to consider it to be sexual assault than participants who had not experienced it, the study found.

"It is a little discussed area and it is in that grey zone because it's consensual sex so if it happens people often legitimise it in their heads and tell themselves 'it wasn't that bad,'" Ms Latimer said. She said many of the women surveyed were stealthed by somebody they knew. Two groups were found to be particularly vulnerable to the practice: female sex workers, who are more likely to experience sexual assault in general, both in and out of their workplace, and men who had sex with men and had anxiety or depression. Half the respondents said they had experienced emotional distress after an incident of stealthing.

Ms Latimer said while further investigation is needed into the prevalence of stealthing, clinicians should be aware of the practice and consider integrating a question about it into their sexual health consultation. Dr Catriona Melville, deputy medical director of family planning organisation Marie Stopes, said stealthing falls into the area of sexual and reproductive coercion. The organisation released a discussion paper last year that examined reproductive the area. It found women who experience violence from an intimate partner are twice as likely to have their male partner refuse contraception, twice as likely to have an unplanned pregnancy, three times as likely to give birth as a teen and significantly more likely to have five or more births. "This is an area of violence that we are still exploring as a community," Dr Melville said.