Kajalie Shehreen Islam

Left unchecked, gendered disinformation poses a serious threat to women’s equal political participation.

Shoshi (not her real name) runs an online business on Facebook. This means having to deal with unwanted messages from men on a regular basis.

The #metoo movement and the recent sharing of numerous stories of sexual abuse in Bangladesh and across the world have brought home to us what we already knew – that women and girls (men and boys too, but mostly women and girls) are commonly subjected to various forms of sexual abuse throughout their lives.

Yasmin Saikia, in her book Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971, argues that the "forgotten, hidden memories belong to women who were terrorized, brutally sexualized, and marginalized in the war" and that though they were not directly involved in battle, they "became the site on which violence and power were inscribed".

The statistics, the names, the stories continue to pile up, an almost “normalisation” of the crimes taking place—anyone, doing anything, might disappear. Until one day, until this time, it is one of our own.

One of my earliest memories of my grandmother's house is that of her bookshelves stacked with copies of Begum magazine.

An icon, a visionary, a trailblazer for women of this country, is no more. Nurjahan Begum, the editor of Begum, the first weekly