Marital Rape and Gender Neutrality: Lessons from Global Jurisdictions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Marital rape remains one of the most contentious issues in Indian criminal law, reflecting deep-rooted social norms and gendered assumptions. While international human rights instruments increasingly recognize marital rape as a criminal offence, India continues to exclude non-consenting sexual acts within marriage from the definition of rape under Section 375 IPC. This paper critically examines the legal, social, and comparative dimensions of marital rape, focusing on how gender-neutral laws have been framed in global jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, and Australia. Using a doctrinal and comparative legal methodology, supplemented with socio-legal analysis of empirical data and judicial pronouncements, the study identifies key legislative approaches, judicial reasoning, and policy interventions. The paper argues that adopting gender-neutral definitions, coupled with procedural safeguards, public awareness campaigns, and targeted protections for vulnerable groups, can help India align with constitutional guarantees of equality, dignity, and bodily autonomy. Policy and legislative recommendations are offered for reforming Indian criminal law while balancing protection and equality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".