Sexual abuse among married females; A threat to mental and emotional health

Abstract

Background: Any form of sexual hostility, including rape, child molestation, incest, and similar forms of non-consensual sexual contact that results in psychological stress and trauma in the victim is counted as sexual abuse. The person is then victimized with the feelings such as shame, terror, depression, guilt, and many blame themselves for the assault. Repeated abuse results in long lasting destructive and traumatic effects such as panic attacks, hyper vigilance and many females complain about sleep disturbances, suicide ideation, psychosomatic symptoms and flashbacks because of these sexual assaults. Unfortunately in Pakistan as far as the marital rape is concerned it is still considered as the right of men to treat, use, love, betray or built sexual relationship with his wife according to his own wish even if it is against the female’s will. Method: An observational study was conducted that included the information provided by married females with their own will and submitted the data to the experimenter in a personal interview. Results: suggest that approximately 70% of the females were forced, threatened or even hurt to be intimate with their partners un-willingly even if they were mentally or physically unable to do so. There was a high ratio of females who were involved in the sexual encounter just to avoid verbal and physical abuse. Conclusion: However no women is willing to talk about such events happening in her life and do not consider any help in this regard because of a numeral social, cultural and religious barriers that are major contributors for her declining mental and emotional health.