Also, Saudi Arabia’s legal code is based on the Shari’a law, which criminalizes rape as punishable by death. However, spousal rape is not included in this criminalization according to Shari’a law. Although these laws exist against rapists, the actual conviction process is complicated and nearly impossible.
In order for a perpetrator to be convicted he or she must confess or there must be four witnesses of the act (FreedomHouse). Usually in these certain circumstances, there are only two witnesses present, the perpetrator and the victim. Since it would be hard for a victim to find four witnesses, it is very unlikely that a perpetrator would admit to such a heinous act that he or she could very well get away with.
Another example of the insufficient laws against rape is that foreign female domestic workers, which consists of 1.5 million of foreign nationals, receive no protection from the labor laws and are more prone to be victims of abuse. Based on this research, it can be concluded that while there are laws against rape, the actual conviction of rapists is very rare. This could be a plausible cause of the high rape scale since the punishment of such an act hardly occurs.
The third possible cause of a high rape scale in Saudi Arabia is the taboos against reporting rape. There are many social stigmas that scare women away from reporting a rape to the police. One social stigma is that in many instances, the law enforcer will accuse the woman of having illicit sex instead of accusing the man of the crime (FreedomHouse). As a consequence of this accusation, societal reprisals take place such as a woman being seen as unfit for marriage or even violently punished for bringing shame to the family. In some extreme cases, honor killings have been committed against women who have been raped (Zoepf).
