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The Right To No: The Crime Of Marital Rape, Women's Human Rights, And International Law, Melanie Randall, Vasanthi Venkatesh
The Right To No: The Crime Of Marital Rape, Women's Human Rights, And International Law, Melanie Randall, Vasanthi Venkatesh
Brooklyn Journal of International Law
More than half of the world’s countries do not explicitly criminalize sexual assault in marriage. While sexual assault in general is criminalized in these countries, sexual assault perpetrated by a spouse is entirely legal. The human rights violations inhere in acts of violence against women are now well recognized. Yet somehow marital rape is a particular form of gendered violence that has escaped both criminal law sanctions and human rights approbation in a great number of the world’s nations.
This silence in the law creates legal impunity for men who sexually assault or rape the women who are their wives …