Bangladesh must change to protect its women
How many more times do we have to write this?
Another rape, another woman brutalised, another family silenced, another round of outrage. Another case of the government assuring us that they will ensure justice. Yet, it keeps happening.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. This is the brutal truth women in Bangladesh face today. This country has become no less than a battlefield for women—one on which we are losing because, let's face it, we hardly have anyone on our side.
Whether it's an alley, a classroom, or a rice field, almost every corner of this land seems to be a reminder of how vulnerable women are in Bangladesh.
When it comes to the deplorable Muradnagar incident, please don't pretend this has not happened before; don't feign your shock and ask, "How could people do this?" Because then I ask, "How could you forget the woman in Subarnachar from 2018?"
The Muradnagar survivor's trauma is unimaginable. Her fate, though? Predictable. Because here, sexual violence is no longer an anomaly, it is a day-to-day activity for some—a recurring headline, a twisted ritual that seems to have gotten stitched into the fabric of our society. And yet, we show no shame. The predators know it. They know the system; they know the silence of those in power.
Within days of the rape in Muradnagar, a sixth-grader was raped in Mymensingh. Another was almost raped in a madrasa dormitory, by the director of the institution. Days before, a woman was raped in a train toilet. On Sunday, another 10-year-old was raped.
These were just the cases that were reported. Remember, our victims don't like to report being assaulted because they know the level of impunity our legal system grants rapists and sexual abusers. The Muradnagar survivor has been dragged through the mud just because she dared to file a case against her rapist.
And if you think these are isolated tragedies, look at the data.
From January to May 2025 alone, 383 rape incidents were recorded. Seventy-one of those cases could not even be traced to formal police reports—nearly one in five survivors whose trauma was ignored and erased.
And even when women do report, the system makes them pay for it all over again. Our justice process is designed not to protect women, but to exhaust them, humiliate them, and ultimately silence them. We force survivors to prove their violation, to surrender their bodies again for immediate DNA evidence before they have even had a moment to breathe. My colleague, during a Viewsroom episode I recently hosted, laid it bare, "Right after rape, women need to choose between healing and justice, and that is not fair."
The legal system piles indignity upon indignity, while survivors endure trials that drag on for years, sometimes decades. Many survivors simply give up, unable to withstand the endless character assassinations, public scrutiny, and procedural hurdles.
Worse still, many have to prove in court that they were "good enough" to not deserve rape.
Meanwhile, we see in Facebook comments how there are so many men who think almost all women deserve to be raped, just because they are women, proving once again that rape is not borne out of sexual attraction but is a form of powerplay.
Imagine surviving the worst violation of your life, and being told in court that your own behaviour, your choices, your so-called "character" are on trial, but not the man who destroyed you.
In the case of the Muradnagar rape, the court did not even have to go so far. We had our own "esteemed" journalists crowding the traumatised victim, asking her, "What was your relationship with the man who raped you?" Trying to prove she had something to do with the crime she's a victim of. How much we love shaming our women is evident just by this.
Even recent legal reforms, like the 2020 High Court guidelines on rape trials, remain ineffective due to poor implementation. Comprehensive reforms have been demanded for years: trauma-informed investigations, expedited trials, removal of archaic evidentiary rules. But progress? Progress limps while women bleed, and no one seems to care. Cases pile up in court dockets, police investigations are slow, botched, or deliberately sabotaged. All the while, survivors face stigma in their own communities, some driven to suicide before their cases even make it to a courtroom.
This script plays out on repeat and you cannot blame one government. They have all done the same to us: political influence protecting predators, silencing survivors, portraying the destruction of a woman's life as a temporary scandal.
We are a country that flaunts its female leaders and boasts of women's "empowerment" at global forums. Scratch beneath the glossy veneer, and the rot is impossible to ignore.
We raise girls to believe education will liberate them. But what liberation exists when you can be raped on your way to school? What protection exists when even infants are not spared or where every rape is followed by victim-blaming, legal loopholes, and deafening silence from those in power?
Let's stop pretending. Bangladesh needs to change, urgently, to protect its women, in all its corners.
Like many of you, I too am only left with the soul-crushing knowledge that until this country stops treating women's bodies as battlegrounds, until the powerful stop shielding monsters, until justice becomes more than a televised performance, until our society learns and we teach our boys that rape is always wrong no matter who the victim is, we will have to keep writing these headlines. We will continue to cry while they keep making false promises of "safety for all women under our government."
Until then, this so-called nation of progress will keep failing us.
Naziba Basher is a journalist at The Daily Star.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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