of legal rights include: "The punishment of a wife by her husband, the disciplining by parents and teachers of children under their authority within certain limits prescribed by law or by custom". In 2010, the United Arab Emirates's Supreme Court ruled that a man has the right to physically discipline his wife and children as long as he does not leave physical marks. Wife-on-husband violence Although most research is focused on wives as victims of marital rape, husbands experience marital rape as well. Little research exists focusing on the specific situation of non-consensual wife-to-husband sexual relations, but evidence suggests that 13%-16% of men are victims of assault by marital or cohabitating partners in their lifetime. Research conducted by Morse (1995), Straus (1977-1978), and Straus and Gelles (1985) suggest that men and women have nearly the same annual rates of victimization of violence by a marital or cohabitating partner. One study that looked at lifetime experiences of marital and cohabitating partner violence found nearly equal rates of victimization among men and women. However, these statistics convey the larger topic of partner violence and do not reflect rates of marital rape. Sustaining factors Legal Legally, governments have direct impact on the occurrence of marital rape. The state "…engages in the definition, monitoring, and sanctioning of appropriate behavior". This can play out in criminalizing or not criminalizing marital rape and therefore deeming what is appropriate. Catharine MacKinnon argues that rape laws in male dominated societies exist to regulate access to women from a male perspective, not to protect women's right to freely decide whether to engage in sexual intercourse or not. Whatever the reason behind such laws, even when state laws have criminalized marital rape, state institutions perpetuate it. For example, although marital rape has been criminalized throughout the United States, the original laws of the 1980s and 1990s treated marital rape differently from non-marital rape, and in some states this continues to be the case even today (see Marital rape (United States law)). As these laws exemplify, marital rape is seen as somehow less reprehensible than rape outside of marriage. Even when marital rape is prosecuted successfully, courts often pass shorter sentenceseven if the law itself does not stipulate thisbased on the view that sexual violation is less serious if it occurs within marriage. Following this same understanding, British courts often pass lower sentences to marital rape than to other cases of