No matter how it is categorised, rape is wrong and the abusers should be punished. The conversation on criminalising marital rape in Malaysia must continue.
BACK in the early 1990s when I was studying in Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, United States, one of the big stories on campus and in the country was date rape.
At that time, the idea that a woman could be raped on a date by her companion was new. At that time, most people still thought of rape as “stranger rape”, when a woman was raped by a stranger and not by someone she liked or was dating.
Date rape became part of the national conversation when Katie Koestner, an 18-year-old student, went public with her ordeal.
.In 1990, on her first week on campus at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, Koestner met a guy whom she described as “amazing-looking and luckily had the talent to match”.
He asked her for a date. They went to a fancy restaurant where the waiters spoke French. After dinner, they went back to her room in the residence hall.
He suddenly pushed her down when they were dancing in her room. She told him “No” and “Please get off” and he kept on saying, “Calm down, everything’s going to be fine.”
And Koestner lost her virginity against her will. She lodged a rape report at the police station.
However, subsequently, the District Attorney told her that she only had a 15% chance of winning the case because at that time, for the act to be classified as “forcible rape”, she would have had to fight him off.
So, she decided to use the university disciplinary system. Her attacker admitted she had said “No” more than a dozen times.
“Eventually she stopped saying ‘No’ and I knew I’d changed her mind’,” he told the disciplinary hearing.
“The next day the dean called me to his office and told me I should feel safe. They’d found him responsible and he wasn’t going to be allowed in my residence hall for the remainder of the semester,” Koestner told the BBC in an interview in 2016.
But according to her, the dean also said, “You two make such a nice couple and he really likes you, so maybe you could get back together.”
That made Koestner furious. She started a campaign to highlight her case. And the media picked up her story and the issue of date rapes. Time magazine put her on its cover with the headline “DATE RAPE”.
“In my case, people called it ‘date rape’ because I’d gone out to dinner. People stuck a descriptor in front of ‘rape’, like there’s ‘date rape’ and ‘real rape’,” she told the BBC.
“That shocked me – that somehow if you got dinner out of it, then it wasn’t a bad rape. At least you had a nice meal.”
She continued: “I’m not going to say which is worse, being grabbed by a stranger off the road and you’re lucky if you live, or being out with someone you think you can trust, who has all the makings of your Prince Charming and having them disrespect you completely.”
“If I had been raped on a street, then I’d have been afraid of strangers, but if you’re raped by someone you know, then you’re afraid of everyone,” she said.
“For me, the attack was just wrong. I didn’t rate it, define it or judge it. I just thought that was wrong. No one should ever go through what I did.”
Back then it was fascinating to follow the national debate in the US on when a date can turn into a rape. On campus, there were discussions on how suka sama suka (mutual liking) can turn into tak suka (a no) in the very last moment and a man should respect the woman’s no as “no means no”.
Once the woman tak suka and a man does not respect her “No”, then it is rape.
I was reminded of the date rape controversy during my college years when I read about the statements on marital rape in Malaysia.
The Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO) demand that the government should criminalise marital rape.
Based on a 2014 Universiti Sains Malaysia study, the women’s rights group said 9% of “ever-partnered” women in the peninsula had experienced domestic violence, out of which 11% reported enduring “forced sex”.
(An ever-partnered woman refers to a woman who is married, is living with a man but not married, has an intimate partner but is living apart from the intimate partner, or currently is not married and does not have an intimate partner but has been married or has had an intimate partner in the past.)
The WAO was disappointed with Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Mohamed Hanipa Maidin’s comment that the government did not plan to make marital rape a crime.
A marriage licence shouldn’t give a man the licence to rape his wife. When a woman says no, it means no.
“Marital rape often occurs in the context of domestic violence. By not recognising marital rape, we are empowering abusers and sending the message that it’s okay for husbands to rape their wives,” said WAO communications officer Tan Heang-Lee.
We should make marital rape a crime. Imagine the horror of being married to a rapist. - Star
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