The Bhutanese Leading the way.
By Megom Wangchuk
On October 2nd, the Tsirang District Court handed down nine-year prison sentences to six men convicted of raping a minor. According to the court, the men knew the girl was a minor. One forced her to drink alcohol and smoke before raping her. The perpetrators used social media and mobile phones to reach her and subsequently used threats, money transfers, and mobile data to stop her from reporting it. Each was also ordered to pay the girl between Nu 22,500 and Nu 45,000 in compensation. Nine years might sound substantial until we look at what our law says about something else…
Under Section 352 of the Penal Code, an offence involving the removal of a zung from a chorten or religious statue, the theft of certain antique religious objects from a lhakhang, dzong, chorten, or museum, or the vandalising of Ten Suum is classified as a first-degree felony. The punishment for that is a minimum of 15 years to life imprisonment. Under Section 183, rape of a child above the age of 12 is a second-degree felony. The punishment for that is a minimum of 9 years to 15 years.
Let me be clear: this isn’t an argument against protecting Bhutan’s religious heritage. We should absolutely protect sacred objects, architecture, and the material inheritance of our civilisation. A zung is not merely an antique. For Bhutanese, it carries profound religious significance.
But a legal system is also a statement of priorities.
And it is difficult to explain to a child, or to the public, why the destruction or theft of an object held sacred can expose an offender to a minimum of 15 years imprisonment, while the rape of a child begins with only a nine-year sentence.
The above is even more difficult to ignore when viewed through the lens of our country’s domestic-violence figures.
Bhutan’s National Health Survey (2023) found that 39.7% of ever-partnered women had experienced at least one form of physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or controlling violence during their lifetime. The survey also found that 43.9% of women believed a husband was justified in hitting his wife under at least one circumstance. In September 2026, Bhutan Broadcasting Service reported that police recorded 1,105 domestic-violence cases in the previous year. In case you missed it, that’s an average of three cases a day.
These facts should alter the way we address domestic violence. Instead, violence inside a marriage is still too readily described as a family matter. Victims are told to reconcile. Neighbours are encouraged to stay out of it. Relatives worry about the children, the family’s reputation, the marriage, the husband’s future, and the wife’s future. But we forget to ask the most basic question: Are they safe?
When violence in an intimate relationship is understood as something to be privately negotiated, the underlying message is that a woman’s bodily autonomy is conditional on maintaining family harmony.
A society that teaches women to endure violence for the sake of the family makes it harder to establish a culture in which consent is absolute. This is why domestic violence cannot be separated from rape, coercion, and sexual abuse. They aren’t identical crimes, but they are fed by overlapping social ideas: the idea that men are entitled to women’s bodies, that women should accommodate male anger, that family reputation matters more than disclosure, that victims should remain in abusive relationships, and that domestic violence should be a private family matter.
The law matters. But laws cannot change a culture on their own. If violence is dismissed as a family matter, even the strongest legal protections will struggle to reach the people who need them.
The Penal Code is emphatic about the sanctity of religious heritage. It recognises that some things are so valuable to Bhutanese society that ordinary criminal penalties are inadequate. Damage to them is not treated merely as theft or vandalism; certain offences are elevated to the highest category of felony.
So then why doesn’t the same moral seriousness extend to human beings?
If our laws can say this object is so sacred that destroying it warrants the possibility of life imprisonment, they should be capable of saying with equal clarity that a child is so sacred that violating them warrants the strongest protection the law can provide.
This does not mean every rape case should automatically carry life imprisonment. Sentencing requires distinctions between offences, circumstances, and degrees of culpability. Nor does a harsher sentence by itself prevent sexual violence. But laws communicate norms. They tell citizens what the state considers especially serious.
And when the legal structure places certain acts against religious heritage in the first-degree-felony category while the rape of a child over 12 begins in the second degree, Bhutanese society is entitled to ask whether the hierarchy still reflects its values.
We cannot congratulate ourselves on protecting the physical symbols of our heritage, at least, not while we are uncomfortable confronting the violence committed against the people who are supposed to inherit it.
