United in misogyny?
The Bangladesh Mahila Parishad reports the following for January 2025 alone: 85 girls and 120 women were subjected to torture in Bangladesh, among whom 67—including 42 minors—were raped. Fourteen minors were gang-raped, one girl was murdered after rape, and two more survived attempted rape. In February, 72 girls and 117 women were subjected to similar kinds of violence.
For all the ways, Bangladeshis remain divided—by class, language, religion, and political ideology. But there is one shared, unshakable truth that unites us: our misogynistic attitude towards women. It is so normalised that it moves seamlessly across political parties, economic classes, and generational divides.
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In its most recent manifestation, we saw two young women, who were smoking at a tea stall, being berated, surrounded, and physically assaulted by a group of men. Asked about that event, Home Affairs Adviser Lt Gen (retd) Md Jahangir Alam Chowdhury's reminder that smoking is banned for both men and women (read: smoking in public is banned for both men and women but only women will be beaten for it) served as an implicit endorsement of the assailants' attacks.
The recently published United Nations (UN) fact-finding report related to July-August mass uprising in Bangladesh in 2024 found that there was systematic targeting of female protesters during the uprising that we so hoped would bring us freedom. Armed members of the Chhatra League, the student wing of Awami League, were reported to beat, grope, and threaten female protesters with rape, often in the presence of law enforcement. In detention, these women endured sexual harassment, inhumane treatment, and threats of sexual assault by members of police, the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), and the Rapid Action Battalion (Rab). The stigma surrounding sexual violence suggests that the true extent of these abuses is likely underreported. The Monsoon Revolution that we so hoped would bring us freedom, did not.
Misogyny in Bangladesh is a thriving ecosystem, carefully cultivated and sustained by institutions and the society at large. Women are harassed in the name of culture, battered in the name of tradition, raped as a show of power, and silenced in the name of "family honour." This ecosystem includes politicians who refuse to pass meaningful laws, law enforcement officials who laugh off reports of assault, judges who hand down lenient sentences, journalists who sensationalise or downplay reports of rape and harassment, teachers who tell girls to dress modestly to avoid trouble, and employers who refuse to hire women for certain roles because they might become "distracted" by marriage or children.
It also includes fathers who tell their daughters not to speak too loudly, aunties who warn against giving your daughters too much independence, uncles who make fun of sons who cherish their wives, men who joke about marital rape, sexualise women in everyday conversations, and neighbours, or passengers in buses, who look the other way when screams pierce the night.
Also, the glorification of toxic masculinity, the locker room talk and the "men will be men" remarks, lawmakers who speak in circles about "protecting women" while drafting policies that strip them of autonomy, and religious leaders who weave divine authority into systemic oppression.
And it is not just Bangladesh. Misogyny is a global phenomenon—built into the laws of nations, cultures, institutions, belief systems, and the unspoken rules of daily life. It thrives in parliaments and prayer halls, in corporate boardrooms and community gatherings, and in the way justice is served and denied. In the US, a woman's right to control her own body is under attack with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In Afghanistan, women have slowly been disappearing from public spaces; there is also a ban on secondary education for girls, barring 14 lakh girls from schooling. In France, Giselle Pelicott got drugged and raped by her husband and 50 other men, which her husband facilitated. In India, Moumita Debnath, a 31-year-old female doctor in Kolkata, was brutally raped and murdered at her workplace. In Kenya, Ugandan Olympic marathon runner Rebecca Cheptegei died after her boyfriend reportedly poured petrol over her and set her on fire. In Iran, the brutal crackdown on women who defy the country's mandatory hijab laws continues even after 19-year-old Mahsa Amini was beaten to death by Iran's morality police for showing hair. Bangladesh seems perfectly in tune with the rest of the world, at least in this regard.
At the risk of sounding like a broken feminist record, patriarchy is the oldest and most enduring system of oppression, morphing to fit each society's unique contours but never disappearing. Every political movement, every so-called revolution, every war has used women's bodies as battlegrounds. As Bangladesh navigates the crossroads it stands at, confronting its internal challenges and external perceptions, it is no surprise that what emerges most prominently in the threads weaving the "new Bangladesh" is the characteristic misogyny. So, whether it is an authoritarian regime clamping down on freedom or opposition parties using women's safety as political rhetoric, the violence never stops. As more and more cracks in the political and legal systems are exposed by political upheavals—some surprising, some not—the one thing that remains glaringly obvious and unsurprising is: there isn't, and never was, a time when women are truly safe. Possibly, there never will be.
Shagufe Hossain is a Bangladeshi advocate dedicated to justice, equity, and youth leadership based out of Canada.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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