Driven by protests, Bangladesh has adopted capital punishment for rape, but further solutions are needed to put an end to systemic sexual violence in the country.
Bangladesh has recently introduced the death penalty to punish rape, a decision that follows widespread protests against the very high number of sexual assaults in the country. In Bangladesh, a rape occurs every six hours.
If you go to sleep at midnight and wake up at six in the morning, somewhere in Bangladesh a woman has been raped in the meantime. While you are with your family or with your daughters, somewhere in the country someone else's daughter is being raped. When you are out shopping with your wife, someone else's wife is fighting off her attacker. No woman can call herself safe in Bangladesh.
In October, a housewife was stripped and tortured in Begumganj, in the district of Noakhali. At Sylhet MC University, another housewife was raped while her husband was tied up; a young girl, meanwhile, was the victim of a sexual assault by a Christian father in the district of Rajshahi.
In response to these atrocities, thousands of students and people from all walks of life took to the streets in the capital Dhaka and in other parts of the country. Some protesters called for a number of reforms, including the death penalty for rapists, arguing that the country has lost all sense of morality due to the absence of a proper justice system and law enforcement.
Government secretary Khandker Anwarul Islam then announced on 12 October a draft law on the prevention of oppression of women and children, which punishes rape with the death penalty or life imprisonment.
Two days before the announcement of the new law, news reports told of a man who had pressured a friend into raping his wife to punish her for refusing to prostitute herself. Of a housewife raped after getting off a rickshaw. Of another woman who was gang-raped in her own home. Of a father who raped his daughter. A 56-year-old landlord who raped the daughters of one of his tenants, nine-year-old twin girls he had offered a Coca-Cola. An uncle who raped his niece in Khulna, in the district of Chandpur. Another uncle who raped his niece — this time a young child — in Tangail, in the district of Feni.
According to Ain-O-Salish Kendra, a Bangladeshi human rights organisation, in the period from January to September of this year 975 women suffered sexual assault, of whom 208 were gang-raped. The organisation gathered this data by collecting information published in newspapers.
Cases of sexual violence have almost doubled over the past ten years, according to data from the Bangladesh Mahila Parishad (women's committee). While cases of physical violence against women have fallen by forty per cent over the past decade, the number of sexual assaults has doubled, rising from 940 rapes in 2010 to 1,855 in 2019. In reality the situation is far more serious, because these figures capture only a fraction of the actual number of women who are raped. Many women do not report the violence they suffer because of the social stigma imposed on victims. The country's justice system is also very weak, and corruption and disruptions in the judicial process make it almost impossible to obtain reliable data on the true scale of the phenomenon.
In most cases, victims are treated as the guilty party by the police, and as a result they and their families give up seeking justice and do everything they can to conceal the crimes that have taken place. Rapes often come to light only when victims die or their condition becomes critical. Even the alarming number of published cases therefore fails to reveal the true extent of the problem.
Even these incomplete statistics show that sexual violence against women in Bangladesh is a widespread phenomenon. Political influence, administrative failure, the absence of social resistance and the lack of enforcement of existing laws are the main reasons why so many rapists are never imprisoned.
Even the rape of minors is now a daily occurrence and no longer shocks people the way it did a few years ago. Among the victims in 2019, 133 were girls under the age of six. Once again, the real statistics are difficult to uncover in a conservative and reserved society like Bangladesh's, in which men's violent behaviour is all too often excused with the phrase "that's just the way they are".
Last year, the news of the sexual assault of Samia Afrin Saima, a seven-year-old girl brutally murdered in the Wari area of the capital, shocked the public. Her body was found in a building under construction, where she used to go and play with her friends. In this case a man, Harun-or-Rashid, was found guilty of rape and murder and sentenced to death.
New research is being carried out and new strategies are being developed across the world to combat rape and prevent child abuse. But Bangladesh is hampered by outdated laws and ideas. Prevention policies have not been updated for many years, unlike in neighbouring India (although the situation on the subcontinent remains complex).
Rapes and abuses have shaken the conscience of people from every walk of life; the message that emerges is that no woman, rich or poor, is safe. While the population and protesters call for exemplary punishment for perpetrators, it has been proven that protests and punishments are not enough to stop rape. Feminists are calling for a change in men's attitudes and mindset towards women.
There is no evidence that the death penalty deters crimes, including rape, which could discourage reporting of incidents or even push rapists to kill their victims to reduce the likelihood of arrest.
Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch
What is needed is the establishment of a social education system in every neighbourhood; a committee for the elimination of drugs and violence against women must organise cultural and sporting activities, in which boys and adolescents are involved and educated about the inhumanity of violent acts. These organisations should recruit the very boys who harass and insult women on the street, encouraging them to become more sensitive and respectful; and every boy who learns this lesson could influence ten others. The time has come to find far more serious solutions than those seen so far.
Translated by Elettra Tsikoudis
