Criminalizing marital rape would be “excessively harsh,” the Indian government has said, in a blow to campaigners ahead of a long-awaited Supreme Court decision that will affect hundreds of millions of people in India for generations.
In India, it is not considered rape if a man forces sex or sexual acts on his wife, as long as she is over 18, due to an exception in a British colonial-era law.
Most Western and common law jurisdictions have long since rectified this – Britain outlawed marital rape in 1991, for example, and it is illegal in all 50 US states.
But across the world, about 40 countries do not have legislation that addresses the issue of marital rape – and among those that do, the penalties for non-consensual sex within marriage are “significantly lower” than other rape cases, according to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2021 State of World Population review.
It was still punishable as coercion. Corporal punishment (i.e. what you’d do to coerce) of wives was outlawed in the early 1800s (and somehow only on the books since the late 1700s), it stuck around quite a bit longer for serfs, for underage apprentices and I think at schools it stuck around until 1956, your own children until 2000.
There’s much more to it than misogyny it was a culture of coercion in general.