Rokan's Journal

Maj Gen HRM Rokan Uddin (Retd)

Rape is among the most devastating crimes a society can inflict upon itself. It is simultaneously a personal violation of the most intimate kind and a social wound that spreads far beyond the individual victim, corrupting trust, silencing women, and rotting the moral foundations upon which any civilized community must stand. That it is rising – not merely being reported more – is a reality Bangladesh can no longer afford to discuss only in whispers or manage only with candlelight vigils that fade as quickly as they are lit.

The historical record offers no comfort. Bangladesh’s National Crime Research Centre and various rights organizations have documented an accelerating trend over the past two decades. According to Ain o Salish Kendra, one of the country’s most respected human rights organizations, at least 1,413 women and children were raped in Bangladesh in 2020 alone, of whom 208 were gang-raped and 47 were killed after rape. These figures represent only reported cases and in a society where shame, family pressure, fear of the legal system, and distrust of police prevent most victims from ever coming forward, the actual numbers are believed to be a multiple of what appears in official records. The United Nations has consistently estimated that globally, fewer than one in ten rape cases is ever reported to authorities. In Bangladesh, that fraction is likely even smaller.

Understanding why this crime persists and grows requires an honest and unflinching examination of causes – not the kind that protects the powerful by blaming the powerless, but the kind that looks squarely at what is producing perpetrators. The proliferation of pornography and unregulated access to sexually explicit content online is a genuine contributing factor, but it must be understood correctly. The problem is not that pornography depicts sexuality – the problem is that the dominant global pornography industry overwhelmingly depicts women as objects without agency, as bodies to be used rather than persons to be respected, and frequently normalizes violence, coercion and degradation as erotic. When young men – and in Bangladesh the average age of rape perpetrators has been declining for years – consume this content in the absence of any counter-narrative about consent, dignity and equal humanity, it shapes attitudes in ways that researchers across multiple countries have documented. A 2015 meta-analysis published in the journal Aggressive Behavior, reviewing studies from seven countries, found a significant association between pornography consumption and both attitudes supporting sexual aggression and actual sexually aggressive behaviour.

But pornography alone does not produce rapists. If it did, every man who has ever accessed such material would be a perpetrator, which is plainly not the case. The deeper causes lie in structures – in patriarchy as a system that teaches men from childhood that women’s bodies are available for male use, that masculine identity is tied to dominance and sexual conquest, that a woman’s refusal is a challenge to be overcome rather than a boundary to be respected. In Bangladesh, this patriarchal formation is reinforced across multiple institutions simultaneously: in homes where girls are taught to be quiet and boys to be assertive, in educational curricula that contain virtually no meaningful content about consent or bodily autonomy, in religious interpretations that are weaponized to police women’s behaviour while leaving male behaviour largely unexamined, and in a legal and law enforcement system that for decades treated rape as a matter of family Honor rather than individual criminal violation.

The argument that women’s dress is a cause of rape is not only empirically unsupported – it is morally corrosive. Rape occurs in every country regardless of dress codes, in every season, against women of every age from infants to the elderly, against women in full covering and women in Western dress alike. The countries with the most conservative dress requirements for women are not the countries with the lowest rape rates. To argue that women’s clothing provokes rape is to argue that the criminal has no moral agency – which is precisely the argument perpetrators make in their own defense. A society that accepts this argument has, in effect, decided to manage rape by restricting women rather than by stopping men, which is both unjust and demonstrably ineffective.

Free mixing between men and women is similarly blamed in conservative discourse, but the data does not support the thesis. Most rapes in Bangladesh, as in most countries, are committed not by strangers but by people known to the victim – neighbours, relatives, employers, teachers, religious figures, and intimate partners. The fiction of the stranger-rapist lurking in the shadows serves to distract from the far more common reality of the trusted person who abuses proximity and power. Keeping women segregated from men does not protect them from the men who already have access to them.

What produces and sustains rape culture is a combination of impunity, institutional failure, and socialized contempt for women. In Bangladesh, conviction rates for rape have historically been catastrophically low. A 2019 report by the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust found that between 2011 and 2019, conviction rates in rape cases were below two percent. Below two percent. This means that in Bangladesh, a man who rapes a woman has a greater than ninety-eight percent chance of facing no legal consequence whatsoever. This is not merely a failure of justice – it is an active invitation to repeat offending. When perpetrators know they will not be punished, when victims know coming forward will expose them to secondary trauma from police, courts and community alike, the crime continues and grows.

The effect on the fabric of society is profound and cumulative. A society in which women cannot move freely, cannot study late, cannot work at night, cannot trust the men around them is a society that has forfeited half its human potential. Fear is a tax levied exclusively on women – it costs them mobility, opportunity, education, economic participation and psychological health. It costs families who restrict daughters’ movements to protect them. It costs employers who lose talented women who cannot safely commute. It costs the nation in the unmeasurable form of the lives half-lived, the contributions never made, the voices permanently silenced.

Controlling and ultimately eliminating rape requires interventions at every level simultaneously. The legal system must be reformed root and branch – not merely by making punishments harsher, since evidence consistently shows that the certainty of punishment deters crime far more effectively than its severity, but by making conviction more likely, investigation more rigorous, and victim support more comprehensive. The police must be retrained and held accountable. One-stop crisis centers for survivors must be funded and scaled. The judiciary must be equipped and pressured to process cases within defined timeframes rather than allowing them to drag for years until witnesses disappear and victims give up.

Education is as important as enforcement. Comprehensive, age-appropriate education about consent, bodily autonomy, healthy relationships and gender equality must be embedded in the national curriculum from primary school onward. Boys must be taught – clearly, repeatedly and without apology – that women are their equals in full humanity, that no means no under every circumstance, and that masculinity built on dominance is not strength but cowardice. Families must have these conversations. Mosques and madrasas and temples must speak clearly and consistently about the sanctity of the female person – not about the threat posed by the female body.

The digital environment requires urgent regulation. Internet service providers must be held responsible for preventing minors from accessing violent pornographic content. Media – including social media – must be held accountable for content that sexualizes violence against women or normalizes predatory behaviour. The entertainment industry, including the informal content ecosystem of YouTube and Facebook that reaches tens of millions of Bangladeshis, must be engaged rather than ignored.

Bangladesh has the tools to turn this around. It has laws – the Women and Children Repression Prevention Act, amended multiple times to include provisions for the death penalty in certain cases. What it has consistently lacked is institutional will, the resource allocation, and the cultural honesty to implement them. Passing laws is the easy part. The hard part is building a society in which a woman’s body is treated as her own – sacred, sovereign, and entirely beyond the reach of any man who has not been given her free and uncoerced consent. That society is not built in a single moment. But it must be built. The alternative is a country that has decided, through its silence and its inaction, that it can live with this. Bangladesh cannot. No society that calls itself civilized can.