10 Tweets By Indians On Marital Rape Show How Far We Are From Gender Equality

Twitter Reacts To Marital Rape Issue: The recent petition to criminalise marital rape has ignited a fresh debate across the country, and many people have retorted to social media channels including Twitter to opine on the issue. People are coming with mixed opinions on the controversial issue which has been rooted in the society yet unspoken of for years. 

In a petition related to the hearing in the Delhi High Court, the counsel representing the Delhi government told the court that marital rape is already covered as a Crime of Cruelty under the Indian Penal Code(IPC). 

Twitter Reacts To Marital Rape Issue-

1. "Husband wants to have sex when wife doesn't #MaritalRape. 

  Wife wants to have sex when husband doesn't #DomesticViolence" - Radhika Seth

2. "Some men crying because there is an ongoing discussion about #MaritalRape being legally punishable as rape. Any man defending it or pretending it is going to be misused is shameless. Criminalisation of marital rape is long overdue." -Aditi Sharma

3. "#MaritalMolestation #MaritalRape #498A is another way to torture a man legally."- MenToo Page

4. "If #MaritalRape is included in IPC, am building an App which will use fingerprinting authorization, save date, time, terms, conditions etc. on secured server with KYC, for husbands to take on the App before getting all cosy. It will be a new use case of taking 'precautions'!" - Koshur Rohit

5. "I stay in a country where Husband will be prosecuted for having SEX with his Wife.... Guess the country...??? #MaritalRape" - Manish Sindwani

6. "We are blindly following western laws . Any law criminalising Marital Sex will destroy our age old social fabric and Family system. Say no to Law on #maritalRape" - Kavya Dureja

Suggested Reading: Five Timeless Shows To Binge Watch Across OTT & Television

7. "Opposition from men against recognition or #maritalrape was still expected (considering they are ignorant privileged vultures) but women standing against the same baffles my mind. Like how is any woman comfortable with the idea of another woman suffering in silence ?" - Udita

8. "Every woman has the right to say NO. To everyone including to her husband. And no man can be allowed to force himself on a woman, even if the woman is his wife. The exception to S. 375 IPC assaults the autonomy of a woman. It is that simple. #MaritalRape" - Sarfraz Nawaz

9. "If the fabric of your society has threads of forced sex on women, this fabric should be shredded to pieces." -Sweta Das

10. "This #MaritalRape discussion is very important because we've all seen the extent to which Dowry law has been weaponized to destroy the lives of millions of men. I'm a woman myself & i fully support women whenever necessary but this will affect the very fabric of Indian society." -Tanisha Batra

India is among the 36 countries around the world that have not criminalised marital rape. The exception to Section 375 of Indian Penal Code says that sexual intercourse by a man with his wife, with the wife not being under 15 years of age, is not considered rape.

We live in a country where a woman cannot take her husband to the court for sexually violating. For some reason, it is considered that husbands always have their wives' consent. After every few months, the issue of marital rape is raised either on social media or at the courts but law against the offence is far from site.

After analysis of the National Family Health Survey of 2015-16, LiveMint reported that over 99.1% of cases of rape go unreported in India. In most of such cases, the accused persons were the husbands of the survivors. The same report states that a woman is 17 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted by her husband compared to others. Just because a woman gets married, her consent has no value ?

Views expressed by the author are their own.