SPEAK OUT

NEWS, LAWS & LEGISLATION SURROUNDING RAPE
EQUALITIY NOW

NEW YORK TIMES, June 6, 2000
UNITED NATIONS (AP)

Women's rights activists demanded that countries which have promised to promote equality between the sexes repeal laws that discriminate against women, including those that allow rapists to escape punishment by marrying their victims.

Equality Now, a nonprofit organization, has launched a campaign to abolish the dozens of laws in penal codes and constitutions "which are fundamentally inconsistent with the basic human right to equality,'' said Monique Widyono, the New York-based organization's co-director. At a press conference, she and a half-dozen women activists from around the world detailed some of the laws that were supposed to have been revoked according to a platform of action adopted at the landmark women's conference in Beijing in 1995. The legislation includes restrictions on women's rights to own property in Nepal, their right to pass on citizenship to their husbands in Kenya and the ban on women voting in Kuwait.

Equality Now and a host of grass-roots organizations are calling on governments attending a conference reviewing the progress since Beijing to set a date of 2005 to finally repeal the legislation. "Elimination of discriminatory laws does not require the allocation of financial resources -- it merely requires political will,'' Widyono said.

Susan Chiarotti, regional coordinator for the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women's Rights, said several Latin American governments, including Peru and Costa Rica, had recently repealed legislation that would allow rapists to avoid serving jail time if they offered to or married their victims. But still others have the legislation on the books, even if it isn't necessarily enforced. "It is very difficult to provide for penalization of sexual violence of marital rape if the law consents to the foundation of a family upon a crime like rape, abduction or sexual abuse,'' Chiarotti said. She said countries including Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela have such laws, which are rooted in religious norms written 3,000 years ago dictating that a father of a rape victim could ask for money from the perpetrator and oblige him to marry his daughter. "She was considered damaged object and the person who spoiled it had to keep it,'' Chiarotti said. Another form of discriminatory legislation are laws that condone "honor killings,'' allowing men to escape punishment for killing a female relative who has shamed the family.