“I had a child born of rape. That night remains engraved in my memory. I knew that I was at the peak of my ovulation. I was still breastfeeding my nine-month-old baby. This boy, conceived that night, died a month after his birth, as if he had been doomed from the outset,” recalls Hamida, a sense of guilt perceptible in her voice.
The rapist was none other than her husband. This was not the first time that she had been forced to sleep with him. Her “no,” “I’m not in the mood tonight,” “I’m tired,” were of no consequence.
It wasn’t until years later that Hamida dared to utter the word “rape.” She didn’t learn it until long after it began. She knew that she was forced to sleep with her husband, would feel “the weight of his body” on her, his deafening breathing, the back and forth which she experienced as punches, her sense of disgust afterwards, her anger.
“But we learned that it’s our duty to do it. That it’s his legitimate right. I knew this. But I think I also had the right to not want to sometimes, to be exhausted by housework and the children. To have only one desire: to rest,” Hamida recounts.
When sex is an obligation
What Hamida saw as “a duty” lasted for years—and continues today. “It’s even worse today,” she relates. “I don’t understand how he can still want to do it. We’re relatively old. We’ve already had children. Plus, he is no longer capable,” she adds. Having been through menopause, Hamida adds that vaginal dryness adds to the pain of submitting to her husband’s will.
But her husband insists, excited by the pornography he watches on a regular basis. “He would ask me to do things to please him,” Hamida stammers, not daring to say more. She finally came up with excuses to escape going to bed with him, such as the obligation to do a full-body ritual cleanse (ghusl) at dawn so that they can pray together. But this doesn’t always work.
The frustration of her 75-year-old husband manifests in the form of retaliation: pouting and constant criticism.
Their children, now grown and married, finally found out. “My daughter, while she understands me, asks me to go along with it in order to be left in peace, to sometimes be willing to make compromises. My other daughter, a devout Muslim, warns me: she fears that I will be regarded as disobedient, sinful (nushuz) and cursed by the angels.” Hamida acquiesces, and “does it” with him sometimes, at her own expense.
“Making love” is not in Hamida’s vocabulary. There is no equivalent of this expression in the Tunisian dialect, which says a great deal about relations between men and women.
Hamida’s story is common to many, transcending women of all ages and socio-economic classes. This is according to Hayet Ouertani, a clinical psychologist who treats victims of violence at the Support Center for Women Victims of Violence run by the Tunisian Association of Women Democrats (ATFD).
But evoking the word “rape” remains difficult for women. “They don’t spontaneously talk about sexual violence, they don’t know how to put these wrongdoings into words. They have an easier time evoking the word for forced “sodomy” (fahisha).” From both a religious and cultural standpoint, sodomy is considered to be a reprehensible practice.
Generally, it is in searching beyond economic and physical violence that we discover the magnitude of sexual violence, Ouertani observes. Even though this form of abuse does not only affect women who face physical violence.
This is because the notion of marital rape challenges perceptions around sexuality. “Not being able to say this word easily, believing that it is their duty to sleep with their husbands even when they don’t want to, is by no means to say that women do not suffer,” Ouertani reports.
Before, marriage contracts were known as contracts of nikah (the act of sleeping with one’s wife). The name has changed, but the cultural and religious association that systematically links matrimony to the act of sex remains. It is also enshrined by the law, which recognizes the notion of “consummating the marriage.”
The Personal Status Code (CSP) even establishes a link between the obligation of paying a dowry—a concept that is denounced by feminists—and consummating the marriage. Article 13 of the CSP holds that:
The husband cannot, if he has not provided the dowry, force the woman to consummate the marriage. After consummating the marriage, the woman, proprietor of her dowry, must claim its payment. The husband’s failure to pay does not constitute a case for divorce.
Furthermore, the CSP is characterized by a writing style much like that used by classic Muslim legal scholars. This is evident in the use of terminology specific to Islamic law: firash (bed), as well as the expressions doukhoul (consummation of the marriage through sexual intercourse), bina (consummation/building of the marriage through sexual intercourse), and fâcid (null or invalid marriage).
The notion of consent is thus biased, argues Ines Chihaoui, member of the ATFD’s executive bureau who heads the Commission on Combatting Violence Against Women.
What is more, rape can take on different forms: a husband who demands what he considers to be his right, his refusal to take into consideration his wife’s desire or state of vaginismus, the obligation to watch pornography together or perform acts that the wife finds repulsive.
Chihaoui places particular emphasis on the influence of pornography. “For some couples, it has become a sort of “third partner.” There are even husbands who film their wives during the act.”
Some practices put sexual partners at risk; the refusal to wear a condom as a means of contraception, or the refusal to treat a sexually transmitted disease, thus exposing one’s partner to infection.
These forms of violence, Chihaoui continues, also extend to unmarried couples, and can even be used as tools of coercion.
A woman’s refusal to yield to her partner can entail all kinds of retaliation: shaming, a husband’s threats to take a lover, to no longer spend on his wife, denigration. “There are men who can’t have an erection and project their failure onto their partner, accusing her of being ugly, stupid, of having a repulsive odor,” Hayet Ouertani tells Nawaat.
Recognizing marital rape
Rape committed within the couple remains taboo, especially in the marital context. “And denouncing it is even more so,” remarks Monia Abed, lawyer and activist at the ATFD. It is considered difficult to prove between spouses, unlike sodomy which Tunisia’s Criminal Code explicitly condemns. Several texts punish any act regarded as “indecent assault.” The cultural and religious influence has a clear bearing upon magistrates, who do not recognize rape between spouses, Abed explains. “This is the mentality which prevails among male and female judges alike.”
Law 58 on the elimination of violence against women defines sexual violence as follows:
Any act or word whose author aims to subject the woman to his own sexual desires or the sexual desires of others, by means of constraint, willful misrepresentation, pressure or other means of weakening or undermining will, regardless of the author’s relationship to the victim.
In theory, the word “woman” also means spouse. And because this article recognizes aggression regardless of the relationship between the aggressor and his victim, marital sexual violence is indeed punishable. However, the interpretation espoused by magistrates prevents an expansion of the scope of the law’s application. “They have the conviction that the marriage contract encompasses the woman’s presumed consent,” Abed notes.
Morocco, a Muslim country, nearly broke away from these beliefs. In 2018, judicial police in Larache, in the north of the country, received the complaint of a young woman who accused her husband of violence and rape. Initially, the justice opened an investigation into an incident of “rape,” before the Court of First Instance described it as a case of “violence and spousal abuse.” The accused was thus sentenced to two years in prison on these grounds alone, the charge of marital rape having been discarded. It was not until later that the Appeals Court of Tanger renamed the case as one of “marital rape.” However, the Court of Cassation subsequently suspended this decision, provoking the anger of Moroccan feminists.
“In Tunisia, as far as I know, there is no jurisprudence which recognizes marital rape committed by vaginal penetration,” Abed tells us.
Silent suffering
Although it remains unrecognized, marital rape is the cause of very real suffering. Victims evoke feeling disgusted by themselves, and a sort of hatred towards their husbands. Their self-esteem, dignity and relationship with their own bodies are severely affected, explains Hayet Ouertani. As the psychologist points out:
For these women, sexuality is not a moment of pleasure, sharing or sexual fulfillment, but of physical and moral pain.
Resigned to their situation, many ultimately yield to their husbands’ wishes. “We often hear the expression: “Let him take what he wants, and then let me be.”
A lack of sexual education does nothing to help relations within couples. “There is such a lack of understanding, so much hypocrisy. Women are raised with the idea that they must be passive, including sexually, that they must mask their desire, even deny it,” Ouertani notes.
For many men, on the other hand, sexuality is an arena of domination in which the woman is seen as an object, expected to perform well and to be open to certain practices, all while remaining a virgin and being modest. From this standpoint, it is not their role to make an effort to arouse the desire of their wives, either by maintaining their physical attractiveness or through their sexual practices, Ouertani continues.
Some husbands bask in this duplicity, keeping their wives submissive and searching for a lover with whom they can satisfy themselves sexually. A practice which is not, however, acceptable for their wives.
Anchored in strict cultural and religious norms, and exacerbated by the absence of sexual education, the silence around marital rape remains intact, fueling a lack of understanding and violence.
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