Marry-your-rapist law
[9] The law has been justified as recognition of the cultural value placed upon female virginity at marriage, in which "despoiled girls and women are a source of shame for their families, innocent of wrongdoing though they may be.
[12] Many activists and organisations believe that these laws violate the dignity of women and degrade them by allowing them to be traded as possessions between families, imply that rape is not a serious crime, and blame the victim and not the perpetrator.
[13] The UN Human Rights Chief, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, said in 2017 that "[punishing] a rape victim by making her marry the perpetrator of a horrible crime against her – there is no place in today’s world for such hideous laws".
[23]: 142 A marry-your-rapist provision is believed by some to be found in the Hebrew Bible, Deuteronomy 22:28–29, which according to the New American Standard Bible reads: "If a man finds a girl who is a virgin, who is not engaged, and seizes (תָּפַשׂ tāphaś) her and lies (שָׁכַב šākhab) with her and they are discovered, then the man who lay (שָׁכַב šākhab) with her shall give to the girl's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall become his wife because he has violated (עָנָה anah/inah) her; he cannot divorce her all his days."
[27] Some Christians believe that the command in Deuteronomy 22:28 does not refer to rape, but to a man enticing a woman to engage in consensual intercourse, as in the passage in Exodus 22:16–17,[28][29] which also explicitly states the father's right to confirm or refuse the marriage.
[23]: 92–93 [31] Adjacent scriptures that speak of forced sexual relations with engaged (versus unengaged) virgins prescribe the death penalty for rapists (Deuteronomy 22:23-27).
If he uses violence he has to submit to the additional punishment, "he may not put her away all his days" (Deuteronomy 22:29).In this specific context, the term "rape" could refer to elopement: a woman would give her consent to being abducted by the man she loved, and thus avoid asking permission from her parents to marry him.
[40] According to the Shulchan Aruch (1565), a codification of Jewish law by Joseph Karo, the girl or her father, depending on age, are given the option of demanding the man marry her in addition to paying a fine of 50 silver[clarification needed] beyond any damages physical or mental.
Alternatively, similar legislation was spread in the region by the Ottoman Empire, based on Hanafi jurisprudence, which did explicitly mention 'rape' in abduction scenarios.
[42] In several Middle Eastern and North African countries, marry-the-rapist laws that were adopted upon achieving independence in the mid-20th century, were carried over from various earlier periods.
Currently, India's Penal Code "makes it amply clear that marriage does not act as an absolving factor in case of rape".
These were Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru (since 1924), Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Colombia repealed its law in 1997, Peru and Chile in 1999, Brazil and Uruguay in 2005, Nicaragua and Guatemala in 2006, Costa Rica in 2007, Panama in 2008, Argentina in 2012, Ecuador in 2014.
[46][48] The practice of forcing victims of rape to marry their rapists continues in some countries where the laws allowing this have been abolished, or never explicitly existed to begin with.
[60] The original article allowed any individual who committed sexual assault to avoid penalty if he entered into marriage with the female victim.
[65] Article 427 of Iraq's penal code, in its current form dating from 1969, states that if the perpetrator lawfully marries the victim, any legal action becomes void.
Neither the law nor society made a distinction between such premarital rape on the one hand, and consensual elopement (in Sicily commonly called fuitina) on the other.
[68] Article 308 of the Jordanian penal code allowed for the perpetrator of sexual assault to avoid persecution and punishment if he married the victim.
Early in 2017, the 10-person Royal Committee for Developing the Judiciary and Enhancing the Rule of Law presented King Abdullah a report recommending the closing of the loophole.
[70] Article 522 of the Lebanon Penal Code became a part of the law in the 1940s and stated that rape was a punishable offense, where the attacker could receive up to seven years in prison.
The Sessions Court verdict that a man accused of two counts of statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl from Petra Jaya in the Malaysian part of Borneo in October 2015, would escape punishment because he claimed to have married his victim,[76] was overruled by the High Court in Sabah and Sarawak in August 2016 after large-scale protests argued this would set a dangerous precedent for child rapists to escape punishment.
In 2012, Morocco amended Article 475, which provided between one- and five-year prison sentence for a perpetrator that abducted or deceived a minor with no resort to violence or threat, or attempted to do so.
[83] The notion that marriage could possibly restore a raped woman's honor has been linked to the country's historical, patriarchal, and gender norms.
[84] According to cultural beliefs, instead of losing her virginity because of immoral behaviour, a woman – or her father – retains the ability to claim that the act had taken place due to coercion, thereby saving the victim's personal virtue.
[85] On 3 April 1997, The Peruvian Congress voted to repeal the 1924 law that allowed rapists to be exonerated from sexual assault charges if they married their victims.
[87] The unrecognised state of Somaliland, which declared its independence in 1991 but is internationally still considered part of Somalia, did not have any law explicitly allowing rapists to marry their victims in order to go free.
In January 2018, the government "introduced a bill to outlaw rape and other violent sexual crimes for the first time in its history, which would see rapists imprisoned for up to 30 years".
[89] In July 2017, Tunisia repealed Article 227 of its Criminal Code which provided a rapist the exemption to avoid all investigations or legal consequences if he married his victim.
The articles stated that in crimes of sexual assault, statutory rape, abduction, and disrespect of modesty, the penalty would be extinguished in cases where the assailant and the victim made a matrimonial contract.
[104] This created a loophole by which statutory rape could be covered up if the marriage is concluded before the authorities found out sexual intercourse has taken place (especially if it resulted in a pregnancy).
