Where rape goes unpunished: the law country by country

"Rape culture": what the phrase means, and what it does not

The phrase was born in American feminism of the 1970s to describe not countries where rape would be "allowed", but a set of attitudes that normalise it: blaming the victim (her clothes, her drinking, her being out), doubting her on principle, excusing the offender ("he couldn't help himself"), treating marital rape as a right. It is not a legal category, and the term remains debated. But the attitudes it describes can be measured. A 2016 Eurobarometer survey asked whether sex without consent could be "justified" in certain situations: 27% of Europeans said yes — 55% in Romania, 47% in Hungary, 43% in Bulgaria, against 6% in Sweden. In India, the 2019–21 National Family Health Survey found that a third of women and men considered a husband could be justified in beating his wife. That measurable reality is what explains why identical laws produce such different results.

Three distinct things therefore hide behind the question "is rape punished?": the law (what does it forbid?), its enforcement (how many complaints succeed?), and the cost to the victim (what does she risk by speaking?). One country can provide the death penalty and leave 99% of rapes unpunished; another can have a mediocre law and a justice system that works.

Where marital rape is not a crime

This is the most widespread case: according to UN Women and Equality Now, more than half of all countries do not explicitly criminalise rape between spouses, either because the law expressly excludes it or because it defines rape in a way that cannot apply within marriage.

• India. The 1860 penal code exempted the husband; the new 2023 code (Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, section 63) kept the exception for a wife over 18. The Supreme Court has had the question before it since 2022; the government opposes criminalisation in the name of "the institution of marriage". Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan (where the law does not formally exclude it but it is almost never prosecuted), Malaysia, Singapore (until 2020), China (no explicit text, rare rulings).
• The Arab world. Equality Now's 2025 report on the 22 Arab League states concludes that none explicitly criminalises marital rape; Jordan, Syria and Palestine exclude it in so many words; Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states do not recognise it. Tunisia (2017) and Morocco (2018) adopted laws against violence towards women that cover it in principle, without always naming it.
• Iran (marriage counts as permanent consent; rape outside marriage carries the death penalty, but a victim who cannot prove coercion risks a charge of illicit relations), Afghanistan (the Taliban repealed the 2009 law on the elimination of violence against women in 2021; no legal definition of rape applies today).
• Africa. Nigeria (the federal criminal code exempts the husband; the 2015 VAPP Act criminalises it, but only in the states that have adopted it), Ethiopia, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia, Senegal (no exclusion but no prosecutions), Ghana (criminalised only in 2007).
• The Americas. The Bahamas (explicit exception, reform bill stalled since 2009), several Caribbean micro-states; Latin America has criminalised it country by country since the 1990s. In the United States, all fifty states criminalise it since 1993, but a dozen still treat it more leniently than rape by a stranger (shorter limitation periods, exclusion when the wife is incapacitated).

Where marrying the victim erases the rape

So-called "marry-your-rapist" laws suspend or cancel the sentence if the offender marries the victim. They have been repealed in Egypt (1999), Morocco (2014, after the suicide of Amina Filali, 16, married to her rapist), Tunisia, Jordan and Lebanon (2017) and Palestine (2018); but UNFPA still counted about twenty in 2021:

• Kuwait (article 182: no penalty if the abductor marries the victim with her guardian's consent), Bahrain, Iraq (article 398: prosecution suspended on marriage, revived only if divorce follows within three years), Libya, Algeria (for the abduction of a minor, article 326), Syria (partly repealed in 2020).
• Russia (article 134: an adult who had sex with a girl under 16 escapes punishment if he marries her), Thailand (rape can be "settled" by marriage if the offender is over 18 and the victim over 15), the Philippines (subsequent marriage extinguishes the action, and the wife's forgiveness extinguishes marital rape), Venezuela, Tajikistan, Serbia (for sex with a minor), several Central American countries until recently.

Where the victim risks punishment

In countries that punish sex outside marriage (zina), a woman who reports a rape without proving it exposes herself: she is admitting extramarital sex. In Pakistan, under the 1979 Hudood Ordinances, four male witnesses were required; the 2006 law took rape out of that regime, but the fear remains. In Sudan (until the 2015 reform), Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (the Norwegian woman sentenced in 2013 for "illicit relations" after reporting a rape, later pardoned), Qatar and northern Nigeria, victims have been prosecuted for adultery or fornication. In Afghanistan, women have been jailed for "moral crimes" after a rape. Somalia and parts of the Sahel settle rapes through arrangements between families, often by marriage.

Where the law exists but is not applied

Impunity in practice is not confined to countries without a law. In South Africa, police record more than 40,000 rapes a year (42,569 in 2023–24), one of the highest rates in the world, with fewer than one case in ten ending in a conviction. In India, 31,516 rapes were reported in 2022 (NCRB) — a figure unrelated to reality — and the reforms that followed the 2012 Delhi gang rape did not shorten the delays: trials last ten years. In Mexico, fewer than 1% of sexual assaults are reported and fewer than 5% of complaints are tried. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the gynaecologist Denis Mukwege (Nobel Peace Prize 2018) has treated tens of thousands of victims, rape has been used as a weapon by armed groups for thirty years with near-total impunity.

Rich countries are not exempt. In England and Wales, barely 2 to 3% of rapes reported to the police led to a charge in the early 2020s, before the Operation Soteria reforms; in Scotland the conviction rate for rape is the lowest of all crimes. In France, the High Council for Equality estimates that about 0.6% of rapes and attempts end in a conviction. In the United States, RAINN calculates that about 25 perpetrators out of 1,000 are incarcerated; a backlog of hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits was uncovered in the 2010s. In Australia, fewer than one in ten reported sexual assaults leads to a conviction. The problem there is not the law but evidence, delay and the treatment of complainants.

Rape as a weapon of war

Systematic rape in conflict has been recognised since 1998 as a war crime and a crime against humanity (Rome Statute, article 7; Security Council resolution 1820 in 2008). Bosnia (20,000 to 50,000 women raped, the first international convictions for rape as torture), Rwanda (up to 250,000 in a hundred days, the Akayesu conviction in 1998), the DRC, Ethiopia's Tigray (2020–22), Darfur and Sudan since 2023, occupied Ukraine since 2022 (International Criminal Court proceedings), Myanmar against the Rohingya, and the sexual enslavement of Yazidi women by ISIS — covered on the page Slavery today — are the recent examples. Judicial recognition is advancing; convictions remain rare.

Those that have changed their law

• Towards consent. About twenty European countries now define rape by the absence of consent rather than by violence: the United Kingdom (2003), Belgium (1989, then 2022), Germany ("No means no", 2016), Sweden (2018, with "negligent" failure to check consent), Denmark (2021), Spain ("only yes means yes", 2022), the Netherlands (2024), Switzerland (2024) and France (2025). Outside Europe: Canada (1983), Australia's states one after another, Japan (2023, which also raised the age of protection from 13 to 16), South Korea (2013 case law on marital rape).
• Marital rape has been criminalised in Singapore (2020), in India for wives under 18 (2017), in Ghana (2007), in South Korea (2013), and almost everywhere in Latin America; Tunisia and Morocco adopted framework laws against violence.
• "Marry-your-rapist" laws disappeared from Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and part of Latin America in under ten years, under pressure from local women's movements — proof that these texts are not cultural fatalities.

Further reading

Forced marriage and bride kidnapping and Slavery today complete this page; the consent country pages give, for each country on the site, the age of protection, the definition of rape and the helplines; the Rights section details sexual offences committed abroad, which most countries prosecute at home even without a local complaint.