Child bride dads liable for rape

(ANSA) - Rome, September 29 - Italy's supreme Cassation Court ruled Thursday that child brides living in Italy cannot be made to have sex with the adult husbands they were forced to marry abroad, and fathers who do so are liable for rape.
    With this ruling, the court indicted an Indian man living in the northern city of Padua who subjected his 15-year-old daughter to an adult man she was forced to marry in Bangladesh in 2012. A preliminary hearings judge had allowed the girl's father to plea bargain a sentence of one year ten months for domestic violence and not rape, arguing he acted not out of a criminal nature but because he belongs to "a culture of abuse".
    The Cassation Court struck down that sentence and ordered the father tried for both rape and domestic violence, without the possibility of a plea bargain.
    It also heavily chastised the preliminary hearings judge.
    "What surprises us most is the subcultural label ascribed by the judge to the father to justify the crime of domestic violence on the one hand, and on the other to exclude his involvement in the deliberate and conscious tolerance of the son-in-law's abusive conduct towards his daughter," the supreme justices wrote.
    The teen had testified that she was being subjected to her husband's every sexual whim and that she lived in a domestic atmosphere of bullying and coercion, and the judge knew about her statements.
    "Stating as the judge did, that the parent has the right to coerce his daughter into obeying his son-in-law, due solely to his cultural background - one which is unacceptable, offends our conscience and cannot find the least justification - is of a pettiness that cannot and must not find its way into our juridical system, and which cannot but surprise us for the ease and levity with which it was made," the Supreme Court wrote. The case came to light when the girl told her teachers at school, and they turned to the justice system.