Indian Law on Marital Rape

Why in News?

• Recently,  laws that clearly criminalise marital rape while there are 34 countries that explicitly decriminalise marital rape, or in essence, offer immunity to men who perpetrate rape against their wives.

Highlights 

• India, is one of the 34 countries that have decriminalised marital rape.
• Section 375 of the IPC defines the acts that constitute rape by a man.
• The provision, however, lays down two exceptions as well.
• Apart from decriminalising marital rape, it mentions that medical procedures or interventions shall not constitute rape.
• Exception 2 of Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code states that “sexual intercourse by a man with his wife, and if the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape”
• It hints at marital rape by any form of sexual abuse in a live-in or marriage relationship.
• However, it only provides for civil remedies. There is no way for marital rape victims in India to initiate criminal proceedings against their perpetrator
• Indian law now affords husbands and wives separate and independent legal identities, and much jurisprudence in the modern era is explicitly concerned with the protection of women.
• Therefore, it is high time that the legislature should take cognisance of this legal infirmity and bring marital rape within the purview of rape laws by eliminating Section 375 (Exception 2) of IPC.
• There is a need for laws that clarify boundaries in how we relate to one another and uphold constitutional ideas of equality, dignity and bodily autonomy, alongside the unpleasant social realities about their limited use in practice.