Domestic violence is a long-standing problem in India, and it has only gotten worse in recent years. Domestic violence affects over 70% of Indian women. The NCRB’s ‘Crime in India’ 2019 report was alarming but not shocking. According to the report, a woman in India is raped every 16 minutes, and she is subjected to brutality by her in-laws every four minutes. According to data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2015-16, an estimated 99.1% of sexual assault instances go unreported, and the average Indian woman is 17 times more likely to be sexually abused by her husband than by others.
Various laws intended to protect women from domestic abuse and sexual assault have mostly remained ineffectual, despite recent criminal law revisions. The fact that marital rape is entirely lawful in India is one of the most terrible and restrictive aspects of the Indian legal system. The act of forcing your spouse to have sex without their consent, known as marital rape, is an unjust but all-too-common technique to demean and disempower women.
In its resolution, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, to which India is a party, proposes that marital rape be criminalised and that such discrimination is a blatant violation of the principles of equality and human dignity. Despite this, our country’s rape laws maintain the patriarchal mindset that women are the property of men after marriage, with no autonomy or power over their bodies. They deny married women equal protection under the Indian Constitution’s laws. A married woman, like an unmarried woman, has the same right to manage her own body.
All forms of sexual assault involving non-consensual contact with a woman are included in the definition of rape codified in Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). In India, marital rape is not criminalized because of Exception 2 to Section 375, which exempts unwanted sexual intercourse between a husband and a wife above the age of eighteen from Section 375’s definition of “rape” and thus protects such actions from prosecution.
Following the establishment of marital relations, a wife is presumed to give her husband eternal consent to have sex with her. In India, marital rape is the definition of “implied consent.” Marriage between a man and a woman indicates that both parties have agreed to engage in sexual activity, and it cannot be otherwise.
Aishwarya Says:
I have always been against Glorifying Over Work and therefore, in the year 2021, I have decided to launch this campaign “Balancing Life”and talk about this wrong practice, that we have been following since last few years. I will be talking to and interviewing around 1 lakh people in the coming 2021 and publish their interview regarding their opinion on glamourising Over Work.
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We are also running a series Inspirational Women from January 2021 to March 31,2021, featuring around 1000 stories about Indian Women, who changed the world. #choosetochallenge