The unspoken crime of marital rape

This article contains testimonies that some readers may find disturbing or upsetting. 

In a village near Mansoura, Naama Mohammed*, 43, is cleaning up the kitchen at the end of the day when she hears the sound of the door opening and then the thump of her heartbeat, which starts racing at the same time every day. She places her husband’s dinner on the table then heads to the bedroom to wait for him to do what he will. Next comes the encounter in the marital bed, an unavoidable daily chore. When the day is over, she waits for a new day that will be exactly the same.

“Ever since I was a child, I’d see my father treat my mother with cruelty and violence, hitting and insulting her, and I’d long for the day I’d be married so I could be rid of that agony,” Naama says. “When a man proposed, I accepted. I imagined that would be the start of a new life, but it was the start of a new kind of agony that started on my wedding night and never ends.” 

She describes her husband’s approach to sex. “From the beginning, he was rough. I thought that was love, or because the marriage was new. Then I became pregnant and was tired most of the time, but it didn’t matter to him. I started to feel like I didn’t matter to him, that nothing mattered but himself. I would tell him, ‘Let’s not tonight, I’m tired,’ and he’d tell me that God and the angels would damn me.”

Her husband accused her of frigidity and threatened damnation whenever she asked her husband if they could postpone sex. Fearing divine retribution, she would ultimately yield: “I’d agree in the end because I was afraid of what he said and I thought it was religiously forbidden for me to refuse,” she told Mada Masr. “And he always made me feel that I was frigid or the problem was mine.”

Naama had her first child and life settled into its routine. Sex remained unpleasant and nonconsensual. There was also physical punishment. “After a while when I refused he began to hit me. Once, he broke my arm. I was afraid of him so I had to agree and just hoped to get it over with. I came to hate these relations and hate any scenes of a couple together in a movie or TV series. It was enough to make me throw up.”

“I talked to him more than once and asked him to change. Every time, he’d promise he would and the next day it would be exactly the same: beating if I refused, insults, continuous violence, threats of divine punishment,” Naama said. “If I had my period, he would also go ahead, but he would wear a condom. I’d ask him why — Didn’t you say that was forbidden, I’d say — and he’d tell me it was none of my business, he knew what he was doing. That’s when I became certain that this life was no good and could not go on.” After seven years of what she describes as torture, having borne their third child and despairing of any change in her husband, she decided to seek a divorce. 

She went to see her brothers, the only family she remained close to after her mother’s death. After telling them she wanted to divorce her husband, one of them asked why. “He rapes me,” she said. He thought it was a joke and asked her the real reason; she gave the same answer.

“Suddenly he stood up and started hitting me in front of my other brothers, who joined in. They just kept saying, ‘Get out of here, you ill-bred woman, before we go and tell your father.’” 

She went back to her own house, not knowing what to do. Would the angels really damn her to hell? Was it really, as her brothers told her, a disgraceful thing she asked? And what would happen to her three children? Finding no answers to these questions, her confusion mounted.

“Then I saw a lawyer from my town writing on Facebook about the cases of marital rape he had worked on. I decided to get in touch with him,” Naama said.

She contacted the rights lawyer and asked for help in divorcing her husband, on the condition that the real reason for the divorce remained unsaid. The lawyer told her he could file for a divorce for cause to ensure her rights, unlike in khula, in which a woman forfeits her spousal rights, but that the case would take a long time at court and she would have to wait.

“I agreed and decided that was it, I would put an end to this life and raise my children, whom my husband wasn’t involved with and knew nothing about anyway.”

But Naama had no income and did not work. She decided to see her brothers again to ask for their help so that she could claim her spousal rights after the divorce. But she received the same response as before.

“This time they kicked me out in front of my kids. They said I wouldn’t get a cent and that I should look after myself and my kids by myself because they didn’t want any scandals,” Naama said.

She went back to her marital home with her three children only to discover that she was pregnant with her fourth child. She called the lawyer to tell him that she had given up the idea of divorce and was dropping the case.

“I had no other choice,” she said. “If it were just me, it would have been easier, but I didn’t know how I’d provide for the three kids and the new one. Their father didn’t know a thing about them. If I had left them with a man like him, who knows what he would do to them, and one of them is a girl who’d be getting married before you know it. I decided to stay and bear it for my children.”

Rights lawyer Ali al-Halawani told Mada Masr that there is no statute criminalizing marital rape, nor is marital rape recognized by the courts as grounds for divorce. Women who want to leave marriages because of rape must file for a divorce for cause and cite other reasons such as physical abuse, abandonment for more than six months, or a refusal to support her or the children. It is then up to the judge to determine the magnitude of the harm sustained by the plaintiff and to grant or deny the divorce. 

In a successful case of divorce for cause, the woman receives her spousal rights to alimony and the deferred dowry. An application for resolution is filed with the family matters office of a family court, after which the husband is notified of the request for resolution and the case is referred to court and placed on the court docket. Halawani says cases take six to 18 months, during which the lawyer will ask for various fees and expenses from the client. Divorce for cause cases require the woman to be present at all hearings throughout the suit, which can also be exhausting. The expense and prolonged proceedings lead some women to discontinue the proceedings. 

The vast majority of divorce for cause suits, according to Halawani, take place not in open courts but in closed proceedings because they involve sensitive matters, such as suits for divorce due to sexual impotence. 

Aida Adel*, 24, was married three years ago in a village in Monufiya. “On my wedding night, I wasn’t at all ready and he was determined to have sex. He was very violent,” she said. “What made me anxious is that his family and mine were outside waiting to assure themselves of my honor, which happens in many families. So he did it and I bled like crazy. He went out and showed the sheet to my family and his. They ululated with joy, but the blood and pain stayed with me for a week. I found out it was a hemorrhage, not regular bleeding.”

Her husband did not consider Aida’s pain for the first week of the marriage and repeatedly demanded sex, more than once a day. She would refuse, but he would do what he wanted, and the pain and bleeding would increase after each encounter. When she told her mother about it, she responded, “Don’t tell anyone or else they’ll envy you for your husband. Thank God he’s in good health. He’s a man and has to do it. Don’t let anyone hear you say such a vulgar thing.”

Her mother’s scolding convinced Aida that if she felt forced into sex, it was her problem and she needed to solve it. Then she consulted the woman of the house where she works, who told her that what she was describing was spousal rape and she should stand up to it.

“She made me understand that I had the right to refuse when I wanted to and that it wasn’t wrong for me to say no,” Aida said. “But I was afraid of my husband and mother.”

A year into the marriage, Aida became pregnant. In the first months of the pregnancy, her exhaustion grew and she stopped going to work. She asked her husband if they could take a break from sex for a while because of her persistent fatigue.

“Once he dragged me into the room, paying no mind to the child in my belly, and put his penis in my mouth,” Aida said. “I gagged because he put it in my throat and I was sick. When I threw up and he finished, he told me, ‘Get your clothes together and go to your mother’s. I don’t need this crap.’”

Aida went to her mother’s house and told her what had happened. Her mother upbraided her again: “She told me it was my fault, that I must have been making it hard for him, and if I kept it up he’d take another wife. I went back and begged him to take me back, telling him I wouldn’t oppose him again. At that moment, I felt like I was worthless to everyone, to my husband and my family.” 

Dr. Yasmine Yousry, a gynecologist, says that at her private clinic she often receives cases involving spousal rape that have an impact on the wife’s health. Some women suffer genital inflammation because of the violence of sex, at times even vaginal bleeding and cervical tears. A woman can obtain a medical report from the doctor, but the legal system does not recognize reports from private doctors. In her work at a public hospital, she has seen them refuse to issue such reports to married women. They are issued only in cases of rape, to be used as evidence, and marital rape is not recognized. This was confirmed by Iman Abdullah, an OB/GYN at the Matareya public hospital, who added that it is difficult to obtain a report from a hospital proving that a husband had sexually assaulted his wife.

According to Dr. Yousry, the harm caused by rape can manifest in ways ranging from vaginal spasms in reaction to sex, due to the brain’s rejection of the act, to a permanent aversion to sex and the partner as well. She says that since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, she has seen more women at her clinic and at the public hospital where she works suffering from rape and other forms of violence.

The UN defines marital rape as rape committed by an intimate partner. Numerous countries treat marital rape as a crime. In 2013, a French court sentenced a man to three years in prison for beating and raping his wife in 2010. In Morocco in 2019, a court sentenced a man to two years in prison and a fine of €200 on charges of spousal rape. Several years prior, Morocco had eliminated a law that allowed rapists of underage girls to avoid prosecution by marrying them. 

Although in Egypt rape is punishable by three to 25 years in prison, Egyptian law does not recognize the rape of a wife by a husband, according to rights lawyer Reda Eldanbouki, the executive director of the Women’s Center for Guidance and Legal Awareness, which coordinates legal and psychological support for women and organizes seminars for women in several governorates to raise awareness of their rights. 

Eldanbouki says that when the center comes into contact with victims of marital rape, they offer psychological support through meetings supervised by psychiatrists as well as legal aid, helping them to file divorce suits. The center also lobbies for a law to protect women from this type of violence. Eldanbouki adds that although there are not always visible signs of rape, in many cases rape can be proven by a physical examination of women filing complaints.

In 2013, the National Council for Women drafted a bill on violence against women, but the draft — which is available online — did not include any articles specific to spousal sexual violence. Nor has Parliament discussed any statutes specific to spousal violence against women.

Marital rape and violence is not limited to rural communities. In Cairo, Amal Mohammed*, 33, left her first husband because he refused to allow her to work outside the home and did not believe in women’s autonomy.

“When I met my second husband, he seemed to believe in women’s freedom. He called himself a communist because of his emancipatory ideas. A month into the marriage, he came to me while I was sleeping and started to grab at my clothes and touch me. I told him I didn’t want to right now, but he ignored me and kept right on,” she says. “I kept pushing him away, not understanding how he could be doing this, until I ejected him from the room. I locked the door and called a friend to come over. He just kept beating on the door until our friend came and took him away. The next day I asked for a divorce. He refused, but I decided that would not happen again. How could I live with someone who wants to rape me? I couldn’t believe that someone who spoke about freedom would do that. For a month, I kept asking for a divorce and he kept refusing, until I told him I’d file a khula suit. He was afraid that might cause a scandal so he agreed to a divorce.”

Amal did not tell her family what happened: “I knew no one in my family would understand me so I told them we were just too different. It wasn’t a convincing reason for them but they’d more easily accept that than the real reason. If they knew that, they might have forced me to go back to him.”

Violence can be another response to forced sexual relations. In 2016, Masrawy reported the story of a woman who beat her husband to death with a broomstick because he forced her to have anal sex, according to her confession to the prosecutor. In the United Kingdom, a criminal defense known as the “slow burn” defense can sometimes be used in court by victims of long-term domestic violence who kill their abusive partners. No such defense, or consideration of mitigating circumstances during sentencing in such cases, exists in Egypt, according to the lawyer al-Halawani. They are tried the same way as other murders.

Civil society organizations have put forward multiple initiatives to address this crisis. Magda Adly, the director of Al-Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture, told Mada Masr that, in 2005, the center began drafting a law addressing all forms of violence against women, including sexual violence in and out of marriage, and in line with definitions of physical and psychological violence in international conventions. Work on the bill continued until 2008. The center visited numerous governorates to monitor types of violence, and organized various conferences. Upon completion, the bill was submitted to Parliament in 2009, but they received no response. In 2010, former Parliamentary Speaker Ahmed Fathi Surour signed off on it and it was forwarded to the Proposals and Complaints Committee.

The bill recognizes spousal rape as a crime and provides for the establishment of a unit in every police station staffed with a female doctor where women can file complaints confidentially. Under the bill, abuse may be proven by witnesses — neighbors, children, or relatives — or through medical forensic reports. Penalties vary depending on the severity of the offense, starting with the separation of the husband from the wife for a period specified by the judge and punitive measures in the event of a second offense, also determined by the judge.

Adly says that the bill was still in the proposals committee at the time of the January 2011 revolution. In 2013, a draft law on sexual harassment was brought forward, but, according to Adly, various political forces felt that that violence in the Egyptian family was too sensitive a subject, and postponed discussion of the bill. Parliament has yet to debate the issue.

Adly says that the provision on spousal rape in the 2010 draft bill came under intense criticism: a cartoon was published showing a married couple with a policeman between them; crude comments were directed at the authors of the provision, and, and a lawyer even filed a complaint against the Nadeem Center regarding the provision.

Adly says that women who endure spousal rape may initially complain of various other types of violence — beatings, insults, economic abuse. But when it comes to rape, they often prefer not to talk about it due to social stigma and also fear of divine retribution, an idea ingrained in them by their husbands and clerics as well. The center deals with these cases in accordance with the woman’s wishes. Some women seek psychological treatment and rehabilitation while others pursue the legal avenue of divorce. 

The lack of legal redress is one aspect of the lived reality of victims. Naama and Aida continue to endure what they describe as forced conjugal relations, hemmed in by the mores and ideas of a society that refuses to recognize the problem they face and prohibits them from even talking about it. Amal is looking for a new partner who recognizes her freedom to consent to — or refuse — sex within marriage.

*Pseudonyms