Something is Rotten in the Institution of Marriage.

Some stories are works of triumph in process. This is a story from an anonymous female who has been a victim of marital rape. The name, age and true identity of the victim have been withheld. It is believed in many cultures and societies that the wife’s body belongs to her husband. That is only partially true. Few fail to reiterate the responsibility and sanctity a marriage entails, especially when it comes to sexual relations between the spouses.

“My meeting with him was really just a typical 'boy-meets-girl’ beginning. I was a young eligible bachelor. After whirlwind courtship, we decided to get married. When we set out on this journey together, I never imagined that in just a few years I would see the same man in his darkest, most cruel form.” The instances of reported marital rape have some common, underlying traits. Apart from in highly constrained and conservative societies of the rural areas where a woman submitting to a husband is already decreed just and compulsory by social norms, the victim’s relationship with her spouse usually begins on a note of blissful ignorance about the harrowing ordeal that she may be about to go through.

And, it doesn’t just begin with the husband straight away forcing his wife to the bed. “It began with him being terribly possessive. He didn't like me talking to other men, and had a sort of strutting, stereotypical masculinity. He could be very crude about women at times, and I found myself constantly justifying him to family and friends.”

“One day, this outward show of masculine hegemony started showing its signs in our personal lives. It started with name calling, which graduated to pushing and hair pulling. It eventually led to sporadic violence. I was ashamed, and covered the bruises. I feared him, but after all, for the world outside, I had chosen to be in this bond.” It is hardly surprising that more than 40% of married woman between the ages of 15-49 have experienced physical, sexual or emotional violence till date in India. The victim’s account is a testimony to the fact that violence of any kind in a married relationship is a dark sign of things to come.

“In six months, I was not the young woman he'd met. Life depended on keeping him happy so he wouldn't hurt me. At first, I believed him when he said he was sorry, and that he would change. I started to not believe it after a while. The sexual violence seemed to utterly despoil all my fantasies of loving and being loved. He would sometimes tell me I was a stupid, prudish woman who needed a to be shown her place; he seemed to enjoy desecrating my highest ideals. I wondered if they were worth hanging on to. Every time he approached me, it was sheer torture. Sometimes it was physical, and forever mental and emotional torture. He was physically brutal and wanted me to indulge in behavior I thought was reminiscent of the most heinous beasts. He never cared about what I wanted or needed. He did not care about whether I was unwell and incapable of satisfying his inhuman needs all the time.”

Many victims report a form of intimate partner violence, i.e., an abuse of power by which one spouse attempts to establish dominance and control over the other. Research shows that it can be equally, if not more, emotionally and physically traumatizing than rape by a stranger.

Marital rape can include a range of forceful and non-forceful acts including unwanted kissing, touching, or and sexual coercion. Abusive sexual behaviors were also found to be correlated with an elevated rate of unplanned pregnancies.

“I didn't know what to be to stop it; it didn't occur to me to think it was strange that sometimes he said he was doing it because he considered me a lesser being, and at other times, because he wished for his ghastly desires to be fulfilled. I now know that it was not about anything that I was or was not. It was about him. At any time, I was never permitted to say no. Strenuous refusal met with beatings.”

“He did not even care that one thing leading to another; I was soon pregnant with his child.”

She tried to talk to her family about her plight many a times. “They thought something was wrong with me. ‘You have to fulfill his needs. He has a right over you. Besides, your unborn child will suffer. Think of him’, is what they’d say every time.”

"Whenever we had a row, he would call my parents and say, 'Will you come and get your daughter? I don't want her anymore.' On seeing their daughters in such a state, most mothers would have said, 'How dare he lay a hand on you?’.”  

“My mother's reaction - 'What did you say to provoke him? I know you – you must have said something.' I felt completely worthless – like an object, instead of a human being. To begin with, I'd push back against him but soon it was just easier to give in, seeing that the people who had raised me had righted this wrong by simply tagging it as ‘normal’.”

“I won’t even recall my in-law’s reactions; because there were none.”

It is not uncommon, especially in Indian societies, for a woman to be obligated sexually to her spouse. There have been vile instances wherein the justification of such acts is given divine sanction; religious scriptures are misquoted and misrepresented to weld the woman permanently to her husband’s sexual fantasies and needs.

“Many of my unmarried friends and acquaintances found it strange when I narrated my ordeal to them. The simplest of their reaction was - ‘How can you protest against your husband’s sexual advances when you are married to him?’ to the outrageous of them all – ‘Are you insane? He has every right over you. Once you are married, these everyday definitions of violence and rape cease to exist. Grow up!’.”

The psychological stress of it all is a testing one. One part is the stress faced while leading up to the act and during it, while other is the stress faced after the act, which is nothing short of traumatizing.

“I could not read what went on in his mind while he was doing it. Maybe he fantasized about killing. Maybe desired to abduct, kidnap and rape me. Maybe he desired strangulation, defecation, blood-letting, suffocation, restraint, gagging, humiliation and violence. I did not know. I could not know. Looking back, it is painful to realize that all of them could have been possible.”

Rape in the ambit of marriage is harrowing moreover. Studies have found post-traumatic stress disorder, fear, anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction to be consequences of marital rape.

Low self-esteem, emotional and economic dependency, continued faith and hope that the abuser will ‘grow up’, psychosomatic complaints, accepting blame and guilt for violence or abuse, social isolation, believing social myths about battering, believing in stereotypical gender roles, poor self-image, attempted suicide, even defending any criticism of abuser are some effects of the stress the victim feels.

“Soon I got some respite in the form of my child. I gave birth to our first son. I thought maybe upon seeing a new life taking shape, tender hands and legs, the soft voice of the little child would temper my husband.”

“I was mistaken.”

“From the beginning he tried to hide his disinterest or lack of jubilation in fathering a son. He made veiled threats about how he owed no sense of responsibility towards the child as he had not planned or chosen for it to be born. This small bright spark in my life was soon fading away. I tried to bring up the boy all by myself, constantly shielding him from the man who gave birth to him.”  

For a mother who raises a rape-conceived child, both the traumatic effect of the rape and the child's blood relationship to the father can create significant psychological problems for both mother and child. If a woman decides to keep and raise the child, she may have difficulty getting the father to accept it, and both mother and child face ostracism in some societies.

 “The child being born didn’t lead to any betterment in my condition. I would beg my husband to stop. He wouldn’t say anything. Or he just said ‘No’. It was no good, and any fight on my part only fed his hunger. I simply learned to accept the fact that he was going to do what he wanted anyway.”

“I never once uttered a sound, fearing it would frighten our few-months-old son who slept in just inches from our bed.”

Threats are routinely directed at children. If a woman says no to sex, the husband refuses to feed and clothe their children. What will she do if there is no food on the table and no money to pay the children’s school fees? Breaking down your wife, making her completely dependent on you, is a classic tactic of abusive husbands. In India, it is a tactic that is helped by social sanction, by the veneration of the marriage bond.

Which is why, women in India don’t talk about abuse in a marriage. They are scared of a broken marriage, of what people might say, of becoming destitute. Many are dependent on their husbands for financial security. They have no place to go, no way to provide for themselves and their children. The victim’s experience in this case clearly elucidates this fact.

However, she soon realized that she would have to make the hard choice of choosing between giving her child a normal, sane life and submitting to her husband routinely. She chose the former, which, considering her helpless condition was a humungous step for her to take.

“I decided to pack up my bags while he was away at work, take my child and leave. I contacted some old friends who were very supportive. I left as fast I could, maimed and injured. When I narrated the entire thing to my friends, I broke down. I did not know what to do. The trauma of going through all of it, becoming a mother and then fleeing made me realize the dearth of affection which I had faced. These past few years were nothing short of hell. It had turned me into an emotional wreck. My psyche had come to categorize that cold treatment and absence of love, feelings and affection as ‘normal’.”

“After I left I knew I could never go back, because if I did I wouldn't be able to get out again. He tried to get me back. With the help of friends I stayed away from his pleas and begging and promising that this time would be different, it was hard, but nowhere near as hard as actually being with him. I got counseling and talked to the few friends I had left, who were supportive and by just letting it out and telling someone, I felt a weight being lifted and I stopped internalizing the abuse.”

“All I would say is that it is possible. It is possible to be treated like an animal by your own husband. However, it also possible to put an end to it.”

There are countless women who go through the same and live with it for their entire lives. Submission and subjugation has almost come to be an inseparable acknowledged trait of the womenfolk in this country. ‘Something needs to be changed’ is a common answer heard after uncomfortable questions of ‘What needs to done?’. Join our campaign at The Infomission Project to find out more. 

-Ziauddin Sherkar.

A The InfoMission Project Writer.