Moral Policing in Bangladesh: legal implications

Moral policing is when someone imposes their subjective standards and ideas of ethics and morality on other people and prevents them from exercising their civil liberty. For example, X thinks women should not be out after sunset. If X approaches a random female pedestrian on the street and starts questioning her why she is outside at an odd time, that is moral policing.

Moral policing is not lawful. Moral policing is done by people who are socially, culturally and politically powerful by abusing their power and privilege without any lawful authority. Moral policing is when a man uses his male privilege to tell a woman she should not be wearing trousers.  It is when a local businessman disciplines a poor female worker because she dared ask for sick leave. It can even be a woman rebuking other women for leaving their babies at home for joining office after maternity leave. None of the grounds that sparked the outrage: wearing trousers, asking for leave or resuming work after pregnancy are backed by legal sanctions. But these moral police believe that it is a moral responsibility to surveil women to keep them at the right place.

Moral policing does not fall under freedom of speech. Free speech does not excuse hate speech or misogyny. Thus, any abuse directed at humiliating a person or group of persons is not protected by free speech as per national and international legal standards.

Why does it happen?

Moral policing is a manifestation of extra-legal mob justice. In most cases, it is the men who do moral policing whenever they feel that women are getting out of control, that women are not preserving the traditional ethos and culture. But because their concerns cannot be enforced through legal means (e.g. X cannot make a complaint to the police that a woman is smoking at a public place) they take the matter in their own hands.

In the Indo-Bangla-Pak sub-continent, moral policing is rampant. It is a widely practised patriarchal norm to make women guilty. women are demanding their legal rights? shameless! women are demanding their due wages? Characterless! women are refusing early marriage? Prostitutes! These are rooted in conservative patriarchal norms which with public sanctions often go unchecked.

What makes the matter worse is that more often than not, even the law enforcement agency engage in moral policing, by abusing their authoritative positions. It is not uncommon in Bangladesh to see police raiding restaurants and parks in towns to arrest couples sitting together. It is a basic civil liberty for citizens to freely and peacefully intermingle in public places. But police arrest couples for simply sitting closely or holding hands under the pretext of obscenity because according to those particular police officers, unmarried couples holding hands constitute immoral activity. These police officers may turn a blind eye to the local loan defaulter or drug dealer, but young lovers never escape their attention.

Moral policing has other manifestations in Bangladesh, and it does not only happen in open spaces or roads. In 2017, a faculty member of Dhaka University Gender Studies department was temporarily dismissed on accusations of displaying obscene content in class; in fact, what the faculty member showed in class were reading materials on human sexuality. It was the Gender Studies department after all! This shows what a scary level moral policing has reached in Bangladesh. Even this year we have seen two instances where government officials by transgressing their authority, ordered women employees in their office to wear hijab and Islamic dress, because they felt by being the head of the office, they can dictate how their subordinates should behave.

Why is moral policing bad?

Moral policing constitutes violation of constitutionally guaranteed civil rights, privacy rights and facilitates violence against women. the most common justification for moral policing is "protecting women's safety and security.

Moral policing has been on the rise in recent times in Bangladesh.  Last week when random men walked up to an adult woman, demanding justification for her smoking, the bystanders justified it by protecting the social values. Nobody seems to notice the men freely smoking which affects children and common people through passive smoking.

The Constitution of Bangladesh guarantees freedom of movement, freedom of association and privacy. Moral policing violates all these rights, especially for women. Article 28 of the Constitution guaranteed equal access to women in all public places and institution. 

Can we prosecute moral policing?

The writer is a sociolegal researcher and teaches law at the University of Dhaka (now on study leave).