The prey bites back

In the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate, the feminist movement in Britain was still campaigning to criminalise marital rape, which is rape of one spouse by the other. The university debating society organised a students’ union debate on the issue, and I remember vividly how heated it was.  

Conservative students, particularly from law school, defended the legal doctrine of coverture, which maintained that husband and wife are one person, and upon marriage, a woman’s legal rights and obligations, including control over her body, were subsumed by those of her husband.

I remembered this when news started to come thick and fast about celebrities, who were highly respected in their fields, and who turned out to be sexual predators.  The most recent was Senator Al Franken who resigned from office for allegations of sexual misconduct. 

When women finally mustered the courage to break the code of silence that shrouded sexual abuse, it turned out that in 2017, almost every single woman has a story about sexual harassment.

People are always keen to blame someone else.  Many in the West blame Muslims for “subjugating women and denying their rights”, while Muslims accuse the West of greater sexual misconduct because “liberal culture is prone to depravity”.  The truth is that this is not a question of East or West; it is the world.  The poor and the young are more vulnerable than those better off, but this is true everywhere. 

The World Health Organisation (WHO) data suggest that nearly one in four women may experience sexual violence by an intimate partner, and up to one-third of adolescent girls report their first sexual experience as being forced.This includes child molestation when it occurs within the context of child marriage.

Yet according to WHO, available statistics typically come from police, clinical settings, non-governmental organisations and survey research.  But they represent only the small tip of the iceberg, compared to the global magnitude of the problem.

Many women do not report sexual violence to police and do not seek medical services for immediate problems related to sexual violence.  They are either ashamed, or they fear being blamed, not believed, mistreated, or even killed to cleanse the family honour. 

This is why the silence breakers were very courageous, and they richly deserved to be selected Person of the Year. They are leading the world to a day when those who hold power over others can no longer coerce them to gain sexual gratification with impunity.  

We may draw some solace from the thought that, althoughthe world’s insanity monitor rises to danger level our moral compass still points in the right direction.  In 1993, the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women established marital rape as a human rights violation, and by 2011, at least 52 states had explicitly outlawed marital rape in their criminal code.  

I imagine that many of the young men who spoke at the debate would be embarrassed if they were reminded today of the things they said.

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