In Kenya, James Kimondo has broken new legal ground by suing the leaders of a coalition of women’s groups for the absence of sex in his life.

Earlier this month, in a bid to pressure Kenyan political leaders to put their differences aside and act for the common good, a consortium of women’s groups known as “G10” organised a boycott of sexual relations with men. Their argument was that men should not have time for carnal relations while their country was disintegrating through economic and political problems.

Last year the country’s president and the main opposition leader formed a power-sharing government but continuing hostility between politicians fractured the coalition resulting in widespread disorder.

The sexual abstinence pledged by the women’s groups clearly had some effect on Mr Kimondo. He issued civil proceedings for damages in the High Court in Nairobi asserting that his wife had refused to honour his conjugal rights because of the campaign. He seeks damages for “anxiety and sleepless nights”.

“I have”, he claims, “been suffering mental anguish, stress, back aches, [and] lack of concentration”. His lawsuit contends that he was happily married until April 29, 2009 when the women’s groups called for a seven-day abstention from sex.

Whether an absence of sex for seven days is a legally actionable wrong is not specified in most countries. In England, the matrimonial obligation is simply to maintain a “mutually tolerable sexual relationship” although even that does not apply across the life of the marriage. The ancient maxim of “twice a week” - expressed in the delicate Latin and Greek maxim bis ruere in hebdomade (to disturb twice in seven) - is not law. As Lord Merriman said in a case in 1947, “there is the greatest diversity of standards between one set of spouses and another as to what is a normal standard of sexual intercourse”.

In 1960, the Court of Appeal ruled that a wife from Croydon was in breach of her marital obligations when, with great intolerance towards her husband who was not as sexually charged as she was, she repeatedly badgered him for sex. To rouse him into copulation she would, in the early hours of the morning, “pull his hair, catch hold of him by the ears, and shake his head violently to and fro”. By eventually conceding to her demands, though, the husband was judged to have condoned her cruelty.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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