Why it’s still legal for Indian men to rape their wives?

Why is it still legal for Indian men to rape their wives: India is the largest democracy in the world and is very diverse because of which it has a huge number of laws to protect different sections of people. Our constitution makers while drafting the constitution of India made sure that every person of society should get empowered with fundamental human rights. Laws were made to ensure that the rights of the people should not get violated but in real life, laws were found to be enshrined more on paper than on ground level. Many laws were made to protect the rights of women but the question is “Are their implementation and accountability authentic?”

Our society is said to be modern but mostly people follow modernity to maintain their outer appearance but not in their thoughts because actually, we are still in the transition phase of modernity. In 2020, we still consider women as an object or baby-making machine. As a result, we can see various kinds of violence happening against women like sexual assault, acid attacks, rape, marital rape, etc.

Why it’s still legal for Indian men to rape their wives?

Well, marital rape is a huge problem in India but it is not well recognized or defined here. As a result, it is not a criminalized offense.  Marital rape refers to unwanted intercourse by a man with his wife obtained by force, threat of force, or physical violence, or when she is unable to give consent. Marital rape could be by the use of force only, a battering rape or a sadistic/obsessive rape. It is a non-consensual act of violent perversion by a husband against the wife where she is physically and sexually abused. Some people say that criminalizing marital rape will destroy the institution of marriage. This is not true. The truth is that rape itself destroys marriages. According to a report, 1 in 3 men admit to raping their wives and 1 Indian woman is raped by her husband every 3 seconds.

The UN Population Fund states that more than 2/3rd of married women in India, aged between 15 to 49 have been beaten, raped or forced to provide sex. In 2005, 6787 cases were recorded of women murdered by their husbands or their husbands’ families. 56% of Indian women believed occasional wife-beating to be justified. The government is not criminalizing marital rape because it believes that some could misuse this to their advantage and will eventually maline the institution of marriage while some who are actually in need of this type of protection are not empowered or enlightened enough to use this.

This is very evident if we see the implementation of the existing system of laws for women protection. In India, 70% population lives in rural regions and 30% in the urban region and this creates inequality among women as rural women are comparatively less literate, empowered and financially independent than urban women. Also, we know that rapes are more prevalent in towns and villages than in cities. So how could we say that criminalizing marital rape is the only solution to end or reduce marital rape.

Firstly we should understand that rape is rape, whether marital or not. In both situations, women go through the same physical and mental trauma. According to the NCRB report, in 94 percent of rape cases, the offenders were known to the victims – family members, friends, live-in partners, employers or others. Criminalizing marital rape will not bring about any significant change as we can see that criminalizing rape has not brought down the number of rape cases rather its increasing day by day but yes it would empower married women in some way and will deliver justice to them.

The real solution lies in giving the right kind of parenting and education to the children which should start right from the day child is born. What we do, our children follow the same. If a child is seeing that his mother is beaten by his father daily and treated ill-mannered so it is obvious that he will do the same and will never learn to respect women.

We always say that boys are strong and never get hurt and cry whereas girls are soft, tender and sensitive. Boys are given cars and robots to play while girls play with dolls. This results in the creation of certain sets of standards, that boys and girls should follow, in the children’s mind. At last, it results in the mistreatment of women which we all are seeing. Thus we need to abolish these prejudice standards that girl is for this and boy is for that. Let the child choose what he/she wants to play. Women’s objectivity is also a big problem and this could be removed by our parenting and media. Media is playing a very disappointing role in reducing women’s objectivity.