“Rape Is Rape, Even If Committed By Husband”: Gujarat High Court (image-pixabay)

The Gujarat High Court has observed that rape is rape even it is committed by the victim’s husband highlighting how several countries have criminalised marital rape.

In the order passed recently, the court citing the silence shrouding over the sexual violence against women in India said that the actual violence against women in India are probably much higher than what data suggests and women continues to remain in environment where they are subject to violence.

Single-judge Justice Divyesh Joshi in his December 8 pointed out that marital rape is termed illegal in fifty American states, three Australian states, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia and several other nations.

The court rejected the bail plea of a women who has subjected her daughter-in-law to cruelty and criminal intimidation while her son raped and filmed her nude to post video on pornography sites to earn money, reports NDTV.

“A man is a man; an act is an act; rape is rape, be it performed by a man, the ‘husband’ on the women ‘wife’”, the judge said. Therefore, the order stated that a man sexually assaulting or raping a woman is amendable to punishment under Section 376 of the IPC.

“In most of the cases of (assault or rape on a woman), the usual practice is that if the man is the husband, performing the very same acts as that of another man, he is exempted. In my considered view, the same cannot be countenanced. A man is a man; an act is an act; rape is a rape, be it performed by a man, the “husband”, on the woman, “wife”, the court said.

Further, the court also pointed out the need to change the social attitude of “boys will be boys” which trivialises or normalises the offences of eve tasting and stalking. It also noted that often gender violence remains unseen, hidden in a culture of silence, and discussed the high cost for women in a male-dominated society to report sexual violence.