Bangladesh and sexual violence in its independence, labor economy, contemporary society and families
Between January 2020 and October 2020, the first nine months of the current year, Bangladesh, a country with chronic underreporting of sexual assault, has seen a record count of at least 1,000 reported cases of sexual assault. At least 208 of these assaults included multiple abusers acting together, at least 43 women were murdered or died as a result of these assaults, and at least 12 committed suicide. Many of these cases include repeat offenders, repeated assault on the same survivor and coercion with a weapon. The Daily Star reports that a nationwide study at the end of October showed that 63% of both urban and rural men believed “wives can be hit if they deny to have sex with their husbands” while another 62% believed that “there are times when wives deserve to be beaten.”
Protests erupted across the country throughout October 2020 as a video of a woman being sexually assaulted at gunpoint by multiple perpetrators surfaced on the internet, uploaded by the perpetrators themselves. The woman had previously survived multiple counts of similar violence from the same group of men. Activists from all over the country took to the streets to protest these increasing acts of violence against women in the country. In a grim juxtaposition, interviews of randomly sampled male pedestrians revealed an overwhelming majority of both rural and urban men who, although condemning the crime, placed blame on survivors.
Ironically, women in Bangladesh have occupied major political offices since the beginning of its parliamentary politics; both leaders of its two major political parties are women. However, both party leaders’ positions were secured through nepotism. Bangladesh continues to be a patriarchal society where violence against women is common, exacerbated by both cultural and religious norms as well as legal clauses in the country’s constitution.
Section 375 of Bangladesh’s Penal Code 1860 defines rape as an act committed by a “man” on a “woman,” failing to criminalize sexual violence against men, boys, transgendered people, intersex people and non-binary people, as well as sexual violence perpetrated by non-men. The messaging of Bangladesh’s homophobic and anti-queer laws does not exist in isolation without reflection in the actual attitudes of its public. Roopbaan was Bangladesh’s first LGBTQ+ magazine and non-profit organization, founded in 2014. The activities of Roopban came to an immediate halt following the gruesome murder of co-founder and publisher Xulhaz Mannan in 2016 by a mob of domestic terrorists.
Section 375 part 5 sets the age of consent at a strikingly low 14 years old but arbitrarily reduces it by another year for married girls. The article specifically includes an exemption clause that states “sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under thirteen years of age, is not rape,” and section 376 further communicates the punishment for rape and reiterates all instances of the act of violence is punishable by law “unless the woman raped is [the rapist’s] own wife and is not under twelve years of age.” The discrepancy and inconsistency in the ages cited alone are concerning.
As per the country’s Children Act passed in 2013, the legal age of adulthood is 18. This translates to the horrifying reality that an adult committing rape or statutory rape on a child between the ages of 13 to 18 — as well as any woman older than 18 — is not a criminal offense if the rapist is her legal spouse. Marriage in Bangladesh is a legally sanctioned and a common site of physical and sexual violence against women.
In a country where marital rape and statutory marital rape are legal and 51% of all Bangladeshi marriages include child brides, the 2017 Child Marriage Restraint Bill, which sets the legal age of marriage for women to 18 and men to 21, further introduced an undefined exception of “special cases” which is pending ministerial approval. This bill, if passed, is predicted to lead to a spike in the already high counts of statutory rape and parents forcing girls to marry their rapists, amongst a myriad of other problems borne out of rationalizing and legislatively allowing child marriage.
There are real consequences of these laws that allow, enable, reinforce and condone violence against young girls through the country’s very constitution. In the last few days of October and the first two days of November, two different cases of child marriages were published in two different Bangladeshi dailies — one of them reporting a death. The 14-year-old child had been sexually violated for a month despite excessive bleeding and pleas for medical attention, which the husband ignored. The husband is not being charged with rape or murder.
Despite repeated lobbying by various women’s rights groups and the federal dominion changing four times through decolonization and wars, these clauses remain in effect and unamended since 1860, the British colonial era. Britain itself recognizes marital rape since the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Pakistan, which had obtained the same penal codes as Bangladesh from the 19th century British lawmakers, also removed the exemption clause from Section 375 that legalizes marital rape under the Protection of Women Act 2006. Bangladesh and India, however, have consistently defended the violent clauses, have made other revisions and have resolved to keep these clauses in effect. As of Nov. 4, and in light of the death of the 14-year-old, a petition has been filed to the Bangladeshi High Court to remove or amend the relevant clauses.
These statistics, legal infrastructure and gross patriarchal impunity paint a very grim picture of the current state of Bangladeshi women. While the country has seen improvements in women’s literacy, education and employment over the past few years, women’s employment in Bangladesh obscures an even darker picture. The majority of Bangladeshi working women’s job opportunities are limited to low-paying industrial sectors. Approximately three million rural Bangladeshi women, which is 85% of all workers, work in the country’s exploitative garment industry, which, at 80% of total export revenue, is also the country’s largest source of export revenue. The garment industry is often cited for its poor work and safety conditions, violence, no minimum wage, and general lack of standard and compliance. Poor implementation of laws and ineffective investigations again enable and reinforce physical violence, sexual violence, and discrimination against women workers in these environments without consequence.
Many rural girls are also funneled into the garment factories of other countries, a fundamental part of the global strategy of capitalism leading women and girls to other countries. There they continue to face violence and become pawns of international colonialism and neocolonialism. Cheap human labor, on which the neoliberal capitalist global economy operates, consists of women and girls from ultra-poor backgrounds in developing countries like Bangladesh. Often these women and girls seek these jobs to escape violent situations at home, avoid early marriage or support their children in an abusive marriage. In 2019, about 270,000 women and girls had gone to Saudi Arabia on labor visas. About 8,000 of them returned to Bangladesh — 53 as dead bodies. When asked to comment on this, the Bangladeshi foreign minister stated that that was “a very small percentage,” clearly punctuating how dispensable poor women and girls are in their own country along with the rest of the world.
Although these are recent stats, gendered violence is not a contemporary development in Bangladesh. It has been weaponized in the country since before its independence. With a genocidal rape count ranging from 200,000 to 400,000 committed by Pakistani militia against rural Bangladeshi women and girls, about 250,000 counts of unwanted pregnancies and 25,000 to 70,000 unplanned births during Bangladesh’s independence war from Pakistan, Bangladesh has experienced one of the highest counts of war crimes in modern history. It is important for researchers to contextualize the country’s current violent state of patriarchy to its history of politicized gendered exploitation and persecution. This will help better inform temporal factors, individual and institutional mechanisms, and the cultural and capitalistic functions of normalizing the dehumanization of women.
The post-independence Bangladeshi government’s response to the war crimes in the 1970s included granting the survivors the honorific title of Birangona (war heroine) and installing a number of rehabilitative campaigns with the goal of providing the survivors necessary medical treatment, abortion services and re-integrative services. The title has only further traumatized women, who were already ostracized in the patriarchal society, through trauma labeling and gendered labeling.
One of the re-integrative campaigns included incentivizing and encouraging Bangladeshi men to marry the survivors as a form of helping the survivors be reaccepted into society. The problematic nature of this initiative lies not only in the fact that it reduced the survivor’s validity in society to the framework of marriage and male-acceptance, but it also perpetrated further violence against women from their husbands.
Editorials at the time published series of prints referring to gendered war crime survivors as “ruined,” “destroyed,” “dishonored,” “shamed,” “disgraced,” along with a plethora of other damning, objectifying, and reductive terms. This language excludes their voice and removes their autonomy in their representation, appropriating their experience of violence, and rendering them invisible via the very discourse they purported was a service to these women.
A country with such a deep history of gendered war trauma from less than one and one-half generations ago needs to actively address intergenerational trauma. We also need to address how this trauma is reproduced and influenced by various institutions, popular media, literature, traditional norms and family values in contemporary society. We cannot continue to allow culturalized justifications of patriarchy or even quiet rejections of patriarchy. We need to develop a culture of loud and active anti-patriarchy and loud and active intersectional feminism.
In response to the protests of October 2020, the Bangladeshi administration has issued a statement that the death penalty will be the punishment for rape. It is evident the country needs sex education as part of schooling and anti-violence and anti-sexism intervention for boys and men; resources for families and communities to unlearn rape culture and dismantle patriarchal structures; and for the government to take accountability and amend laws. The death penalty is not a solution to a systemic problem. It will likely also increase the rate of murder after sexual crimes and further coercion experienced by survivors, leading them to not report the crimes.
A 2013 United Nations survey found that 88% of rural offenders and 95% of urban offenders in Bangladesh who admitted to committing sexual assault reported experiencing no legal consequences as a result. According to The Guardian, a women’s rights organization in Bangladesh called Naripokkho reported that only five out of 4,372 cases resulted in a conviction between 2011 and 2018. Further, data from the government indicated that only 3.56% of cases managed to be escalated to a trail and only 0.37% resulted in convictions between 2001 and 2020. Section 155(4) of the Evidence Act 1872 — which again has been left unamended since the 1800s — states in any sexual assault case “it may be shown that the prosecutrix was of generally immoral character,” which encourages and enables defaming the survivor. The problem is under-regulation, lack of enforcement, barriers to reporting, and the legal and social implications to survivors who do come forward given these stats and these legal clauses. Approving the death penalty is like slapping an honorific title on traumatized and suicidal sexual violence survivors as a replacement for educating men, as a replacement for providing affirmative action for women and other marginalized genders, and as a replacement for mental health resources for survivors.
Niyonta Chowdhury-Magana is a queer, Muslim-Pantheist artist, activist, and Psychology PhD student at USU. She is from Dhaka, and has lived in New York, California, Bristol, Tokyo, and several other places that have all proved to be formative experiences for her. She has a cat called Kit Cat and she always wants you to know it’s short for Kitten Cat and has nothing to do with the candy Kit Kat.
—niyonta.nch@gmail.com
@niyonta