Call marital rape what it is, say scholars
Dubious theology, cultural conditioning, vague language, and a legal vacuum help to conflate rape with marital rights in Egypt.
Faten Sobhi in Cairo
At 17, Hala Ishaq* was married to a man 16 years older than her. She saw marriage as a path out of her village. It turned out to be 14 years of sexual coercion and violence.
A few days after the wedding, when Ishaq was having her period, her husband demanded sex and forced himself on her, ignoring her pleas that she was in pain. This became the norm in their union.
As a Christian in Egypt, Ishaq didn’t know what her pathway to divorce was. Egyptian Muslim women can get divorced under provisions detailed in the Qur’an and contemporary Islamic theology, but this is less clear for Christians, who must rely on state law.
Nonetheless, Ishaq left when she began to suspect her two children were becoming aware of what was happening to her. Yet, when asked, she does not describe her experience as “marital rape” and says her husband had a right to sex as long as they were married.
Ishaq’s perception isn’t unusual among Egyptian survivors of sexual violence in marriage. In what may be Egypt’s first in-depth academic examination of this taboo, scholars interviewed 15 women (aged 24 to 47) who had been in marriages marked by sexual violence for at least one year.
Many of the women struggled to define their experiences as rape. Rarely did they consider it sufficient grounds for divorce, citing their children’s welfare and social stigma as the main arguments against leaving.
Instead, they described sex as a “husband’s right” and those survivors who recognised forceful behaviour as wrong still avoided calling it rape. They preferred descriptors like violence or coercion, according to Nayera Shousha, who conducted the study, together with Dina Taha. The two women are social psychology professors at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
Shousha and Taha intentionally recruited women of middle-class educational and social backgrounds for their study. They wanted to control for the fact that economic dependency often keeps women trapped in abusive marriages. Even so, they still found that “patriarchal interpretations of religious texts persist, limiting women’s awareness of sexual rights and boundaries”.
Religion has also been reinforced by social conditioning. “Women are socialised to believe they belong to their husbands, available for sex whenever demanded,” says Said Sadek, professor of political sociology at the American University in Cairo.
Sexual violence within marriage is not legally considered “rape” in Egypt. As in 60% of countries worldwide, the act is not explicitly criminalised. “Even publishing research on sexual rights in Arabic is difficult, hence our decision to publish in English,” says Shousha.
The social atmosphere and legal vacuum leave women feeling they have nowhere to turn for support. Instead, Shousha and Taha found, they cope through more submission, religious justification, emotional detachment, and deeper spirituality.
A 2015 Economic Cost of Gender-Based Violence survey in Egypt found only 1% of women sought help from official institutions. About a third turned to their families after being attacked.
Sixty-five percent of those who were married stayed with their abuser.
Although such statistics could suggest that women “accept” the reality, Shousha and Taha found the survivors live with physical pain, ongoing infections, anxiety, depression, self-blame, and marital resentment.
Publishing their findings in the Journal of Family Violence in May, the scholars recommend explicitly naming and criminalising marital rape as a starting point. Egyptian feminist groups have already begun pushing for that, says Amal Fahmy of the Tadwein Centre for Gender Studies, but she acknowledges it will be an uphill battle. “We fought a similar battle over the term ‘harassment’, which was previously dismissed as mere ‘flirting’,” Fahmy says. “The battle for recognition of marital rape as a serious crime has only just begun.”