By Park Si-soo
Staff Reporter
A husband who forced sex on his foreign wife has been convicted of rape, the first time that marital rape has been recognized by a local court.
To date, courts refused to acknowledge marital rape ㅡ a non-consensual sexual assault in which the perpetrator is the victim's spouse ㅡ because it contradicted a law stating that a husband and wife were mutually responsible for faithfully responding to a request for sex from one another. In 1970, the Supreme Court did not uphold a guilty verdict in a similar rape case.
The Busan District Court sentenced a 42-year-old husband to 30 months in prison, suspended for three years, on charges of raping his 25-year-old Filipino spouse.
In the ruling, Judge Go Jong-joo said, ``the accused infringed upon his wife's right to have sex or not. Even worse, he frequently used a blunt weapon to threaten her when she refused his request.''
According to statements in court, the husband threatened his wife with a gas gun and a knife.
The man first met his wife through a Seoul-based international matchmaking agency in August 2006 and they married that year. He was indicted in July 2008 after coercively having sex with his wife, who resisted citing her ongoing menstrual cycle. The man appealed the case.
The United Nations said in 2006 marital rape is a prosecutable offense in at least 104 countries worldwide.
pss@koreatimes.co.kr
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