Understanding Marital Sexual Violence Among Egyptian Women: A Qualitative Study

Purpose: The current presentation aims to highlight Egyptian women’s perceptions, feelings, and coping with marital sexual violence. Throughout culture and history, women are expected to fulfill men’s desires and needs, which leads to the societal normalization of many sexual gender-based violence (SGBV) practices. In Egypt one of the Muslim-majority countries, the legal system does not criminalize such form of violence or fully protect women who their husbands victimize. The Egyptian laws are limited to physical abuse under certain conditions. Methods: A semi-structured interviews with 15 well-educated Egyptian women who self-identified as being in a sexually abusive marital relationship for at least one year and aged between 24 and 47 years. The Findings: Four themes were identified from the interviews: reframing marital sexual violence, women's perceptions and implications, women’s coping during and after being sexually by husbands; and societal and religious interpretation of normalization of Marital sexual violence.