One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman.
- Simone de Beauvoir
TO BECOME a woman, in many parts of the world, is to learn the language of endurance. To become a bride, thus a wife, especially in societies like ours, is to inherit silence, to carry centuries of submission stitched into the seams of a red sari. Because here, a man can force sex upon his wife without consent, and the law will not call it violence. Because in Bangladesh, the law does not recognise marital rape as a crime.
Section 375 of the Penal Code 1860, a colonial relic, continues to exempt men in Bangladesh from being prosecuted for raping their wife, provided she is over the age of thirteen. The assumption is clear — once married, a woman ceases to own her body. Her sexual autonomy is annulled just as soon as she signs a piece of paper.
The legal exemption for marital rape is often defended with appeals to tradition, religion, or the sanctity of marriage. But at its core, it is about establishing control. It imbeds a power dynamic where men have the right to demand sex, and women are denied the right to refuse. The UNFPA’s Violence Against Women Survey Bangladesh 2024, interviewing over 27 thousand women in Bangladesh, reported 41 per cent of women having experienced ‘intimate partner violence’ in the past 12 months and 64 per cent of women surviving physical/sexual violence without the courage or chance to speak about it. Yet, the law’s refusal to criminalise marital rape persists. It lingers as a symptom of a much more critical social malaise, where power, gender, and law coalesce to protect patriarchal dominance while also depriving the victims of their very right to be identified as victims.
Our neighbour India, too, clings to a similar colonial clause, as Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code excludes a husband from being prosecuted for rape. Despite years of advocacy by Indian civil society, human rights activists, and legal scholars, the exemption remains to this date. As noted in The Times of India and detailed further in LegalServiceIndia’s analysis, arguments against criminalising marital rape in India often match those in Bangladesh in the context of anticipating ‘defamatory’ and ‘false cases’, often overlooked or shunned in the name of avoiding disruption to family life and/or incompatibility with religious norms. In October 2024, the Indian government directly opposed petitions seeking criminalisation of marital rape, stating that it would be ‘excessively harsh’ and that marriage is a relationship of a ‘different class’ that has an ‘entire ecosystem’ of laws, rights, and obligations.
Conscious readers might be feeling a déjà vu at this point.
The denial of marital rape as a crime is not unique to South Asia. Till April 2025, at least 35 countries in the world showed no clear laws considering marital rape as a crime, with about 50 more containing law exemptions for husbands. On the other side, Sweden, Canada, and Germany treat marital rape as seriously as any other form of sexual violence. The United Kingdom itself overturned its marital rape exemption in 1991, avowing to the fundamental shift in how modern societies acknowledge consent.
It needs to be questioned why the male right to sex is prioritised over a woman’s right to bodily integrity. Legal reasoning, in this case, neither protects families nor upholds morality. It only reveals that many of the South Asian countries’ legal systems still remain deeply invested in protecting patriarchal hierarchies, sugarcoating it all with culture and traditional norms. Here, we often tend to overlook the fact that consent must be ongoing, enthusiastic, and revocable. Marriage does not transform sex into a duty or an obligation for either of those involved, since it cannot turn coercion into affection.
Yet most of these words, written prominently by great men, lose their gravity once taken off of textbooks. Because the ‘representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.’ Not my words, but Simone’s.
Hefazat-e-Islam in Bangladesh recently demanded the abolishment of the Women’s Affairs Reform Commission, rejecting their ‘anti-Quran’ recommendations outright with a 12-point demand. Earlier, Jamaat-e-Islami ameer Shafiqur Rahman denounced the Commission’s discussions on marital rape, challenging its very plausibility. Khilafat Majlish, another Islamist party, showed a similar ideological stance. These are political parties with opinion leaders who concurrently promise a safer tomorrow for women if they are elected.
What happens if such ideologies guide national legislation? What happens when political leaders refuse to even acknowledge violence, let alone legislate against it?
Islamic scholars across the world have debated and affirmed the importance of mutual consent in marriage at large. But when political actors begin to use religion to justify impunity, the chances of them distorting faith to suit power increase. And this places millions of women at risk, declaring them voiceless from the outset.
A recent report by Equality Now on ways sexual violence laws are failing survivors around the world identified certain persistent barriers, i.e., narrow definitions of rape, lack of survivor-centred procedures, and widespread societal stigma, further emphasising that legal reform must be accompanied by structural changes in policing, in judiciary practices, and in public discourse. And the policy motifs that our ascertained party leaders have displayed so far show their worldview, where women are considered secondary citizens, whose consent, among many other things, is irrelevant.
In her book ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Spivak wrote that the voice of the oppressed is often pre-silenced by the structures meant to speak for them. We are told that the law cannot enter the home. But when the home becomes the very site of violence, such state laws can only protect the men’s licence to arbitrariness. Perhaps the real question here is not whether a wife can be raped. The question is, why do the lawmakers insist she can’t be?
Ìý
ÌýTasbir Iftekhar is a communications professional.
