Sexual violence among married women: an unspoken sting

Sexual violence is not only a violation of human rights, but also a public health problem, with intimate partner violence and sexual violence among the most pervasive forms of violence against women. Worldwide, one in three women experience either physical or sexual partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. The lifetime prevalence of sexual partner violence reported by women, in age group of 15 to 49 years, in the WHO multi-country study ranged from 6% in Japan to 59% in Ethiopia, with rates in the majority of settings falling between 10% and 50%. The observed inter community; country and regional variation in the prevalence of violence imply that sexual violence within marriage can be addressed and preventable. The existing prevention programmes need to be tested and scaled up. The majority of women tend to avoid reporting these experiences due to associated shame, reprisal or gender inequity. Current review is an attempt to address the sexual violence among married women in a silent suffering. Various internets based popular search engines were used to explore data from literature, which includes PubMed, PubMed Central, Google Scholar and Medknow. Search was done using the key-word combinations ‘sexual violence within marriage’ and ‘intimate partner violence’. A total of 51 publications were evaluated for this article