Women and Rape: Is Any Progress Being Made?

as i understand it it is very common in latin america rural south east asia
parts of west africa to require a rape victim to marry the rapist
in peru gang rape members are all exonerated if one of them offers to
marry the rape victim worse than that in parts of the arab middle world
as i understand it rape is considered sex outside the marriage so the law
allows for whipping or imprisonment and the culture condones killing or
pressuring that victim into suicide
is any progress being made to end these horrendous practices very little
unfortunately and
not only is their not enough
enforcement of the laws
the way the laws are set up in many of those countries
don't even allow
the woman is essentially punished for coming forth
so it remains a secret it remains shameful and it remains unattended
and the people who are empowered are the perpetrators
because the women has no recourse
it rape of women of a woman in these countries also somehow used as a
political weapon
absolutely and in fact one of one of the
big achievements in the bejeing platform was to make sure that rape became uh...
accepted as a
um... war crime
which
i mean it's it's universally known
and historically known
that anytime that there are conflicts
one of the major manifestation is raping the women
and yet
uh... most
most states
don't have any legal statutes regulation to really address that and
and internationally
in fact i would say there is more that has been done then at the specific local
governments uh... and rape is not a crime of passion it's a crime
it's it's aggression it's not uh...
it's not it's not about sexual desire it's about
uh... violence it's about hurting it's about
subjugating
and uh... and the victims
are
further victimized by
by by the current uh... legislatures in most countries including here i'm
trying to figure out why why the cultures
really think
it's the woman's fault
well american culture thinks that too I mean until recently your your
you know your uh... a feminist lawyer you know I mean how much persuasion of how
many judges
and how many prosecutors has had to go on and it's been pretty recent i mean
i can remember when the two words marital rape
it sounded like a complete oxymoron in fact it was treated like an oxymoron there was no
such thing that's right and it's only because of a woman who really i remember
a woman who was called laura x do you remember laura x
and i remember she came to our campus and she was
in the forefront of having
rape in marriage considered a violation of a woman's rights and she
was treated like
a crazy person
i mean she was treated as if she was so far out on the edge
as if
nobody seriously could even uh... contemplate that's right
take her seriously
and it took something to have that kind of guts and everybody here has at one
point been treated as if they were
a crazy person because what you're trying to do
is say the things that are being
treated as normal
that is that woman is an object of her husband or the object of men's desire
that's normal and in fact it's not only normal it's good for social order it's good
for
tradition always in quotes
and to break that down and to say something that is treated as normal is not normal
that makes you sound crazy and so you really
everybody here but all the people that we've all worked with have had to take
the risk of sounding crazy marital rape is still not legally recognized
in many countries around the world
the remedy for the rape of your wife which is considered a crime against you
is that you can rape someone else's wife who raped your wife i think that when
you look at practices like that you really see the property concept of
women
which underlies
the refusal to recognize marital rape because once you're married you have a
right to this woman in any way you want so it doesn't make sense to to the
systems that you would have something like marital rape
this excerpt is brought to you by the massachusetts school of law