On March 8, the International Women’s Development Agency will present a petition to the United Nations demanding that the global community end the right to rape.
If “the right to rape” seems incomprehensible to you, it’s because we are lucky enough to live in a country that outlaws rape under all circumstances, including marriage. But there are women in the world who do not share in this human right.
In fact, there are 2.6 billion women worldwide in that position.
These 2.6 billion women live in one of the 144 countries where rape in marriage is not a crime.
Those 144 countries make up 73% of the world’s nations, and those 2.6 billion make up 72% of the world’s women. This means that the billions of men living in these countries have the right to rape with impunity.
The IWDA seeks to use its newest petition to strip those men of their right to rape and transfer to the women of those countries the right to be protected from violence and harm within their own homes.
“We’ve been deeply disturbed for some time about the research we’ve seen that makes it clear that in everything we do relating to violence against women, we have a real problem with impunity,” the IWDA’s CEO Joanna Hayter told Women’s Agenda.
“When it comes to sexual and physical violence against women, there is just no accountability. So we asked ourselves, what can we do to end this impunity?”
The purpose of taking the petition to the UN headquarters in New York is to ask the UN to pressure the governments of these 144 countries to take immediate action to criminalise rape within marriage and commit to eliminating rape outside of the home wherever it occurs.
Every region on earth is represented in the list of countries that legally allows rape in marriage. Australia does explicitly criminalise this act and has relatively progressive criminal procedures on all forms of sexual assault, but we are firmly in the minority.
“Under international law, no man has the right to rape. We know there are a set of global conventions to which all nations are accountable that say this is an abuse of human rights,” Hayter said.
“But if you look closely, you see that 73% countries haven’t explicitly criminalised rape in marriage and that is something that desperately needs to be addressed.”
“By presenting this petition to the UN, we are sending a message that Australians do not think this is good enough. We need to see civil societies and governments working together to make sure all the elements are in place that will put an end to violence against women.”
The petition has now collected 10,000 signatures and needs 5,000 more by March 8. As the petition circulates, we looked into the prevalence of rape around the world and the reasons behind the impunity surrounding it.
Unfortunately the impunity with which rape is committed does not begin or end with marital rape.
Even within these 52 countries where rape in marriage is technically illegal, definitions of rape vary significantly and in many cases make the crime almost impossible to prosecute.
In the United States, there is no federally regulated definition of rape, and so its legal definitions vary from state to state. In some states, an assault is only considered rape if significant force was used by the attacker (meaning circumstances like rape while a woman is asleep or unconscious, which are explicitly included in Australia’s definition, do not count as rape in many parts of America).
In some countries, whether or not an incident is considered rape is affected by whether or not the two people involved have a sexual or romantic history.
Physical definitions vary too. In some countries, like the United Kingdom, rape can only be prosecuted if the assault involved traditional intercourse.
Under sharia law, rape can only be proven in the eyes of the law if there are at least four male witnesses to the attack, or if the rapist confesses.
In fact, rape is so hard to prove under sharia law that it is often the women who are jailed as a result, for engaging in sexual activity. Some estimate that 75% of Pakistan’s female prisoners are victims of rape.
Saudi Arabia is another country which punishes victims of rape; In 2009 a gang-rape victim was sentenced to one year in prison and 100 lashings for speaking out about the assault. Yesterday a Saudi historian delivered a chilling insight to the logic behind this.
He explained that countries that legally allow women to drive do so because their laws and cultures do not “care” if women get raped “on the roadside”. By contrast in Saudi Arabia, driving is illegal for women because the law is desperately trying to protect them from being raped. Unfortunately, a country that jails rape victims instead of rape victims simply cannot make that claim.
These varying definitions of rape lead to remarks such those made by Missouri Republican Senator Todd Aiken about “legitimate rape”, which implies that some definitions of rape are somehow too generous.
In all countries, regardless of the legal framework, rape still occurs at an alarming rate.
In South Africa, 40% of women say their first sexual experience was rape. In the United States, 232 reports of rape are made every single day.
Last year alone in Australia, half a million women were physically or sexually assaulted. More than a million women have experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of their partner or ex-partner in their lifetimes.
Worldwide, one in three women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes. 50% of sexual assaults committed globally are against girls under the age of 16.
“Universally, there has not been a cessation of violence against women in any country on earth and in fact, in most countries it is increasing,” Hayter said.
“Just having a law in place does not prevent this violence; we know this because rape statistics in Australia are appalling. There are behaviours that exist within our systems, cultures andcommunities that allow men to feel they are above and beyond the law when it comes to violence against women.”
But there are also circumstances under which the frequency of rape is much, much higher: Rape is still used in all corners of the earth as a weapon of war. In areas of conflict, rape is rampant and insidious.
“Armed forces in Myanmar feel they have been given an authority to rape. Myanmar’s continued disempowering of women through rape in conflict contradicts its international humanitarian obligations,” Hayter said.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2011, 48 women were being raped every hour. That’s 1,152 women every day.
In Liberia in 2005, even after its 13-year civil war has ended, 92% of women surveyed by the United Nations had experience sexual violence.
In Darfur, women and girls still live in constantly fear of rape at the hands of Sudanese soliders, militia members and rebels.
The prevalence of rape in war has become so high that Major-General Patrick Cammaert, a former commander of a UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC said it is now more dangerous to be a woman in war than it is to be a soldier.
He says rape is used in conflict because it is the most effective weapon for destroying whole communities.
As with many war crimes and crimes against humanity, it is rarely prosecuted. Worryingly, last year the Australian government submitted a report to the UN suggesting it was not responsible for violence against women in this context.
Hayter said the persistent use of rape as a weapon of war despite it being outlawed by international conventions is a result of a lack of consultation with the women and girls who witness and are victims of these attacks. She says in order to put an end to rape in conflict we need to involve women in all stages of peacekeeping, peacemaking and conflict resolution.
So why is rape so prevalent? And why do so many perpetrators still enjoy impunity?
Hayter says the answers to these questions lie in systemic cultural norms and practices.
“There exist ongoing cultural or religious fundamentalisms, cultural norms and traditional practices that see so many men believing that women are their property. We still have deeply embedded concepts of relationships and marriage that say it is nobody’s business what happens between a husband and a wife,” Hayter explained.
“We still have a global culture that says a man has a right to beat and rape his wife and that what happens behind closed doors stays behind closed doors. But it is 2015, and the time is up for that.”
Hayter said she hopes the end the right to rape petition will spark more serious global action to end violence against women.
“This is the starting point in something that will soon become much more political and will open up new channels of dialogue. What we really need to do is push the boundaries on the debate between respecting cultural boundaries and promoting global accountability to international humanitarian law.”
“All rape is an outrage. We are taking the next step to try to end impunity because we’ve been working on these issues for 30 years and we are still dealing with the same problems we were in the beginning,” she said.
The prevalence of rape – amid conflict in war-torn countries, on the streets of our neighborhoods across Australia and in homes worldwide – is criminal, and its impacts immeasurable.
It has long been said that in order to truly empower women, we must remove the forces that lead them to harbour a constant fear for their personal safety. That is why we need to end the right to rape.
Sign the end the right to rape petition here.