Adultery

Adultery is generally defined as consensual sexual intercourse by a married person with someone other than their lawful spouse. As there is usually an implicit or explicit agreement between spouses to not have sex outside the marriage, the common synonym for adultery is infidelity as well as unfaithfulness or in colloquial speech, cheating.

Penalties for adultery

Historically adultery has been subject to severe sanctions including the death penalty and has been grounds for divorce under fault-based divorce laws. In some places the method for punishing adultery was traditionally stoning to death.

Related Topics:
Sanctions - Death penalty - Divorce - Laws - Stoning

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In the original Napoleonic Code, a man could ask to be divorced from his wife if she committed adultery, but the adultery of the husband was not a sufficient motive unless he had kept his concubine in the family home.

Related Topics:
Napoleonic Code - Concubine

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In many jurisdictions (e.g, Austria, Greece, Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan), adultery is still illegal, but enforcement of the laws is often uneven. In places where adultery laws are actually enforced, women are often punished more harshly than men, in some cases being considered guilty of adultery even when they have been raped. This has been alleged to happen in Nigeria http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1694027.stm and Pakistan http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2029020.stm.

Related Topics:
Jurisdiction - Austria - Greece - Korea - Switzerland - Taiwan - Illegal - Rape - Nigeria - Pakistan

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In the United States, while a number of states still retain adultery laws on the books, they are rarely, if ever, enforced. In the U.S. Military, adultery is a court-martialable offense only if it was "to the prejudice of good order and discipline" or "of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces" http://usmilitary.about.com/od/justicelawlegislation/a/adultery.htm. This has been applied to cases where both partners were members of the military (and particularly where one is in command of the other), or one partner and the other's spouse.

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In Canadian law, adultery is defined under the Divorce Act. Though the written definition sets it as extramarital relations with someone of the opposite sex, the recent change in the definition of marriage gave grounds for a British Columbia judge to strike that definition down. In a 2005 case of a woman filing for divorce, her husband had cheated on her with another man, which the judge felt was equal reasoning to dissolve the union.

Related Topics:
Canadian - Divorce Act - Recent change in the definition of marriage - British Columbia - 2005

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