Why Marital Rapes Are Not Recognised as Rapes in India?

Girls, it’s where you got birth from, right? Your mothers, grandmothers raised you up.

Noted.

When you can fight for your speech rights, freedom rights; then trust me, you are a part of this issue. Even if married, it takes more courage to stand up and say NO rather than being the silent victim.

The best way that the law protects women subjected to marital rape is by charging the husband with a minor offense of cruelty, the punishment of which goes up to three years in jail or a fine. In worse cases, she can seek restraining order and protection under domestic violence legislation.

In a marriage, you have a person whom you thought you knew intimately, with whom you share a history, a home, and quite often children. It is a person whom you have made love to on a frequent basis often over many years, with whom you have shared your most intimate secrets and fears, and whom you believe to love you, want the best for you, who would never intentionally hurt you. But then they do.

In the most violent way, knocking down the soul was possible.

Survives? Survives. Why?

To tell stories. To live a life of sympathy and utter shame.

Take a moment, breathe and think about this. Marital rape isn’t illegal and that’s okay?

There is no ifs, buts or maybes about it. It’s rape regardless of the relationship between the rapist and the victim.

Asha, my domestic help would come to work at least once a week with a black eye. When asked why she did not complain, she would say, ‘Husbands can hit their wives, ma. It’s the norm’. It’s the same ‘norm’ that allows the husbands of many Asha’s to rape them, without protection, each time they come home drunk.

If Marriages is a contract for legal sex, among other things – where a man doesn’t need to ask for permission and is free to impose himself on the wife? It reinforces the man’s “ownership” rights over the wife. This denies the woman any agency over her own body, its sexuality, and its reproductive function. Refusing to criminalize marital rape is to accept that sexual coercion against a woman, so long as it is within a marriage, will be endorsed by both government and society.