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Don't shun marital rape survivors: Court Cannot Discriminate Just Because Woman Is Aggressor's Wife, Police Told

Sana Shakil TNN

New Delhi: A survivor of marital sexual abuse should be treated as another rape survivor, a trial court has held while denying bail to a man accused of sodomizing his pregnant wife. The court lamented that there are no laws to protect survivors of marital rape in the country but said that those survivors cannot be discriminated against.
"Legislatures are yet to take a serious note of the rampant marital sexual abuse, which the women in our country suffer silently as has happened in the present case. But that does not mean that a battered wife who has been sexually abused and has invoked the legal system of our country is not entitled to any State assistance, which is already available to other victims of sexual abuse," the court said.
Refusing to grant bail to the man, the court noted that the extent of his mental perversity was demonstrated from the fact that he did not even spare his nine-year-old son and polluted the mind of the child by boasting to him about the manner in which he used to make sexual relations against the order of nature with the survivor.
ASJ Kamini Lau directed the Delhi government to take responsibility of the woman. "She is the responsibility of the State and is required to be taken care of just as any other victim of aggravated sexual assault and the State cannot abdicate its responsibility. She cannot be discriminated only because she happens to be the wife of the sexual aggressor," the judge said.
The court also slammed the police for its shoddy investigation into the case.
For long, activists have been pressing for laws to be amended so as to protect survivors of marital rape. But even after the December 16, 2012, Nirbhaya incident, following which laws dealing with crimes against women were made stricter, marital rape was not made a criminal offence in the country.
The law offers some protection to minor victims of marital rape but rape of wife above 15 years of age is not punishable. Statistics paint a disturbing picture about the condition of married women in our country as according to the UN Population Fund, more than two-thirds of married women in India, aged between 15 years to 49 have been beaten, raped or forced to provide sex. Pertinently, marital rape is illegal in several countries such as New Zealand, Canada, Israel, France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Russia.
Centre issues fresh norms for med exam of rape survivors, two-finger test banned
Nagpur: The Union health ministry, which has drawn new guidelines for treating rape survivors, has asked all hospitals to set up a designated room for forensic and medical examination of victims besides outlawing the two-finger test performed on them, dubbing it as unscientific. The Department of Health Research along with Indian Council of Medical Research with the help of experts formulated this set of national guidelines for dealing with criminal assault cases, which will hopefully put an end to the "horrendous" medical process, which the survivors are subjected to after abuse. The DHR has drafted anew manual to address the psycho-social impact of sexual violence including counselling the survivors should receive. AGENCIES