The 2012 brutal murder and gang rape of a 23-year-old women on a Delhi bus triggered massive protests, forcing the government to set up a panel to amend laws related to violence against women.
While Indian parliament passed some of its recommendations, such as criminalizing stalking and making acid attacks a heinous offense,but did not agree with the panel’s proposal to outlaw marital rape.
Sexual violence against women is widely reported across India. Girls molested while going to school or at home by relatives, or of women picked up by men in cars and gang raped.
According to social activists, patriarchal or social stigma make it difficult for victims to speak out about sexual violence by their husbands in India. As a result,married women rarely lodge complaints against their husbands in India.If anyone want to lodge a marital rape case against her husband without consent sex at the police station often officers told complainers that a matter between husband and wife.Because marital rape is excluded from the defination of rape.Rape is a punishable offence under section 375 and 376 of IPC without mentioning the marital.rape and its conviction.
What is Marital Rape
Marital Rape refers to unwanted and non- consent sexual intercourse by a man with his wife wherein the man dominates, pressurizes and threatens her subjecting with physical violence, force, fear generations,anal sex,oral sex, forced sex or any physical activity that leaves the victim in a painful condition…
But according to Law Commission of India marital Rape as a criminal offence. Moreover, in the year 2005, the act passed for the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 did not consider marital rape as a criminal offence but a form of domestic violence. However, under the Domestic Violence Act, 2005, the woman who has been a victim of marital rape can approach the court for getting a legal separation from the husband.
If police refuse to lodge a complain at the police station, victim can approach court though lawyers to seek justice.
According to.government figures, more than 40 percent of married women aged 15 to 49 experience domestic violence, rising to 70 percent among child brides.
Activists want India’s rape law which provides an exemption for sexual intercourse by a man with his wife if she is more than 15 years old to be declared unconstitutional as it discriminates against married women and girls.
Indian governments believe that Criminalizing marital rape could “destabilize” marriages and make men vulnerable to harassment by their wives.
