No new dawn for women

People participate in Maitri Jatra demanding gender justice on May 16 in Dhaka — New Age photo

by Rafia Tamanna

THE month of July 2025 ended not with a promise but with a familiar reckoning. At least 235 women and girls were subjected to various forms of violence in that single month alone. Among them, 74 were raped; 45 of them were minors. Eleven were gang-raped. One woman was killed after rape; another took her own life. The list continues — with suicides, domestic violence, trafficking, abductions, acid attacks, mysterious deaths. And yet, there was little surprise. The figures, drawn from only 15 dailies, capture what we already live with — the ease, the regularity, the entitlement with which violence is inflicted upon women. Violence against women is not an episodic condition. The grip of patriarchy has remained firmly in place — more strategic, more invisible, more condescending than ever.

July was also the month when women, especially female students, stood with remarkable defiance on the frontlines of protests, shielding others with broken sticks, sharpened umbrellas, or just their bodies. In the face of state brutality and party thuggery, women did not flinch. Many of them were brutally beaten. Some were sexually harassed. Others received rape threats. The digital space became another venue for targeted degradation. These are not incidental costs of political unrest. These are recurring consequences of how women are allowed into politics — momentarily visible, momentarily useful and always disposable. The deeper insult lies in how this cycle renews itself: women are praised in speeches and idealised in posters, and yet exposed to the worst of violence without serious accountability.

Recent reporting continues to lay bare the grim reality that violence against women in Bangladesh is neither episodic nor confined to the margins. It is reinforced by institutional habits and social complicity. From professionals in urban centres to rural women with no access to legal redress, women face abuse that is not only physical or sexual but systematically enabled. In place of support, they often encounter a coordinated withdrawal of protection — where legal mechanisms fail, digital platforms become tools of silencing, and informal arbitration replaces justice with coercion. These are not exceptions; they reflect a deeply embedded structure in which the law is frequently redirected to manage women’s dissent, not protect their rights. Rather than confronting perpetrators, society too often redirects scrutiny towards survivors, demanding their shame and silence as a condition for peace.

It is now a convenient political reflex to celebrate women’s participation when it appears heroic or photogenic. But political presence is not the same as political power. And representation without security is theatre. For women to be lauded as symbols of resistance while being violently punished for actual resistance reveals how hollow these gestures are. There is no meaningful inclusion when the cost of being visible is the body. The question is not whether women are fighting — they always are — but whether the systems that claim their inclusion are prepared to reckon with their demands beyond symbolism. And time and again, the answer has been no.

Violence against women in Bangladesh is often discussed with a kind of ritualistic solemnity — press releases, condemnation statements, and panel discussions where everyone agrees ‘something must be done.’ But what we rarely confront is how deeply violence is embedded in the state’s structure of governance. When cases of rape, assault, or torture go unpunished — or worse, are handled through compromise or denial, even celebration — it is not simply a failure of enforcement. It is an institutional signal that violence is tolerable, that some bodies are more violable than others, and that the price of justice is silence. The problem is not that the state lacks power to intervene. The problem is that it does not choose to exercise that power in defence of women — not when perpetrators are politically connected, not when the victim is poor, not when impunity serves the larger structure of dominance.

Even within political movements that challenge the state, women’s safety and voice are not guaranteed. While many women have taken part in the street protests, their inclusion remains structurally conditional. Often their presence is treated as a sign of credibility — ‘even women are with us’ — but not necessarily as a call for feminist transformation. The risk is that women become mascots for legitimacy rather than agents of change. That they are permitted to enter the arena only so far as they don’t fundamentally threaten the masculine codes of hierarchy, heroism and control that dominate all sides of the political aisle.

Successive governments — elected, unelected, transitional — have all been complicit in normalising gendered violence through their passivity and selective response. One may argue that violence is inflicted by individuals, not states. But when the institutions tasked with protection — the police, judiciary, administration — routinely fail to act, what remains is a regime of tolerated abuse. There is no credible deterrent against violence if the consequence of committing it is political protection, procedural delay, or social shaming of the survivor. The result is not just insecurity; it is humiliation on repeat, dressed up as cultural conservatism or legal complexity.

What makes this crisis more disquieting is that it unfolds even as the state formally promises reform. The formation of the Women’s Reform Commission was a rare institutional gesture toward justice, aimed at addressing entrenched gender-based disparities. But the backlash it provoked, from online abuse to organised opposition by religious right-wing groups, was met with little more than silence from the very authorities who commissioned the effort. While other reform proposals have proceeded with relative ease, the targeted harassment of women commission members was left unaddressed. This selective abdication sends a clear signal: that reform is welcome in principle but negotiable in practice — especially when it threatens to disturb patriarchal consensus. In such an environment, the promise of reform risks becoming another tool of deflection, rather than a pathway to justice.

Women in Bangladesh do not need more promises of empowerment or reform while walking through alleys where impunity roams free. They do not need to be told they are the nation’s conscience while facing rape threats for joining a protest. What they need is a state that refuses to excuse violence, in private or public, regardless of the perpetrator’s connections. What they need is a politics that does not extract legitimacy from women’s presence while denying them space, safety and power. What they need, urgently and without condition, is a system of governance that treats violence against women not as a social problem to manage, but as a political crime to uproot.

Until then, statistical reports will come and go. Ministers will tweet about daughters and mothers. News tickers will roll with numbers. But the violence will continue. In homes. On the streets. In silence. In shame. And always, with the same question hurled at those who dare to resist: ‘Dare to come again?’

Rafia Tamanna is an editorial assistant at New Age.