This article traces the broad contours, tensions and complexities of rape law origins and reform in Aotearoa New Zealand. Historical reform debates and controversies in New Zealand illustrate how "classical rape: the rape that is a gender type of offence and ... involves particular conduct" constructed the victim as a valourised resistor and the perpetrator as a blatant disregarder of non-consent. This supported a certain male-imagined sexual logic: that sex is presumptively consensual, and consent can reasonably be attributed to an unwilling person. In 1986, sweeping rape law reforms sought to challenge this logic by reimagining the categories of "victim" and "rapist". As a result of reform, the gap between law's stated abhorrence for and practical sanction of rape has theoretically narrowed. However, certain "classical rape" assumptions — about sex, consent, victims and rapists — have endured in post-reform appellate case law, suggesting that further doctrinal reform will be needed to undo long-standing, embedded beliefs about rights of access to female (and other) bodies.
