Breaking the silence around women’s subjection to violence in the home remains a struggle. A ruling by the Gujarat High Court marked a step forward in this fight. While refusing bail for a woman whose daughter-in-law had complained that her husband and father-in-law allegedly raped her while the family video-taped these acts and sold the clips to pornographic sites, the judge reportedly said that a rape is a rape, even when it is perpetrated by a husband upon his wife. This is a recognition of marital rape which, the high court said, was punishable in numerous other countries and even in Britain, from where the Indian law code was derived. The case in question would attract various other charges too. But the judge’s remarks brought up the argument around the exception made in Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code giving immunity to a husband from the charge of rape except when his wife was below 18 years of age — it had been 15 years earlier. A batch of petitions against this is pending in the Supreme Court; these claim that the exception discriminates against married women. The Centre, meanwhile, had argued against recognising marital rape by referring to ‘social ramifications’. Typically, an earlier government had excluded marital rape from the recommendations it accepted from the J.S. Verma Committee reforms to the law against rape in 2013.

The government’s resistance reflected society’s value system that forces women to remain silent in environments that endanger them. The Gujarat High Court referred to this at length, declaring that this silence must be broken. Irreparable damage was caused through the loss of dignity and self-esteem in situations where violence must be endured because of gender inequality, economic, social and cultural reasons and where the cost of speaking up is high. The court also mentioned the trivialising or ‘normalising’ of so-called ‘minor crimes’, such as stalking or harassment, and making them seem romantic in popular lore — films, for instance — all of which intensified the damage wrought on women. The judge’s remarks recreated the hostile environment women experience in every space, which flourishes because of a double silence — the women’s and society’s. Society’s complicity makes violence invisible; its institutionalisation is therefore invisible too. Recognising the husband’s culpability in rape, or sex without consent, breaches this wall of silence.