Marrying The Victim Cannot Be The End Of The Crime Of Rape
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2021-03-04 06:53:53
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
View all posts by this Author
The Supreme Court trivialized rape and gave offhand legitimacy to the rapist to get off the hook if he agrees to marry the victim by asking a 23-year old rapist whether he was willing to marry the complainant who was a minor when the crime was committed. Rape and marriage are two extremely different things. A rape happens when a man has sexual intercourse with a woman forcibly and without her consent, or even with her consent if she is below 18 years of age. Marriage happens when two adults consent to be united in matrimony. Hence, it is abominable to ask a girl to marry her rapist as she had not consented to having sexual intercourse with him. By allowing the rapist to escape being charged with the grave crime of rape just by making him marry the victim (again without her consent for even if the consent is obtained, it will be by showing her that that would be the best way out for her, which again is highly misogynist) is absolutely shocking. The action trivializes rape and reduces the victim to being a pawn in games others play as if her own decision does not count at all.
Without even going into the fact that the woman would be subjected to a lifetime of trauma of having to live with a man who had forced himself upon her and 'willingly' having sexual intercourse (the very thing for which she had lodged the complaint) with him once they are married, it needs to be stated that the law in India prescribes a punishment for rape which does not include marriage with the victim. Courts are supposed to be interpreters of law. Hence, they must restrict themselves to establishing the crime through the evidence presented before them and punishing the perpetrator according to law. They must desist from making such controversial observations that trivializes the crime or offers an escape route to the perpetrator and scars the victim further.
