Nilima Jahan

Thirty-year-old Aklima Akter of Mirpur’s Duaripara slum shares her tiny and slippery “hanging latrine” with over 80 people in her neighbourhood.

Although the practice of open defecation was declared 0 percent in Bangladesh in 2017, 22-year-old *Nishita Nisha, a member of the third gender community in Dhaka, said that she is still sometimes forced to defecate in parks, footpaths or alleys.

The government has enacted the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act in 2010 that ensures the victims’ rights to law enforcement officers’ assistance, required medical facilities, and legal services.

When her husband faced a huge pay cut a month after the outbreak of Covid-19, advocate Noorjahan Kabir was left with no choice but to step forward to help her seven-member family.

Compensation for rape victims and their family members remains elusive in the existing criminal justice system, with a clear mandate absent in the relevant law, say legal experts.

24-year-old Shirina Akter, who is employed at a ready-made garment factory in Savar’s Nishchintapur, works around 10 hours every day to manage her family of five. But during her periods, she cannot always work for such a long time, and is forced to skip work on the first or second day.

After her father died, around two years ago, Rimu came to the capital from Jamalpur and started working at a readymade garment factory.

Showing the handmade card she made for her elder sister on her 17th birthday on October 9 last year, eight-year-old Reana Asif (not her real name), the younger sister of an English-medium school student in Dhanmondi who died after rape, said, “I will not spare the scoundrel who killed my sister. I want justice.”

Most days of the week, Jagannath University student Ayesha Nijhum is seen sitting in an open field near her house in Gazipur’s Kapasia. The second-year student of management attends online classes on her cellphone for about two hours and prefers the field over her house due to the better signal reception in the open area.

Whenever there is an incident of rape, most people tend to say that it was the girl or woman’s fault, and question her character, social class, outfit, sexual experience, and lifestyle.

It was not the family reunion that she had hoped for.

“Do you want to earn Tk 20,000 per month working from home for only two hours a day?”

Until Sunday night, the sidewalks in front of the Jatiya Press Club were teeming with protesters pressing their demands for various causes, but since yesterday morning the area has been deserted.

The news on rape of a 14-year-old intellectually impaired girl at a disaster shelter, in Pachgachhi union of Kurigram Sadar upazila in 2018, did not make it to the headlines of major newspapers or outlets, but it offers a glimpse of the vulnerabilities women and girls face during natural disasters.

Mohammad Alif’s life has utterly changed.

“Apa, are you sure you will not write my name in your report? If anyone could understand that I am [HIV] positive, I will not find clients anymore and will die of hunger,” said 38-Year-old Ruma (not her real name), an HIV positive sex-worker while speaking to this newspaper yesterday.

While the government has taken steps to ensure victims of gender-based violence such as rape can go to local-level bodies for remedy, these initiatives largely fall flat because of little action and follow-up.

Since the Tazreen Fashions factory fire on November 24, 2012, former senior sewing machine operator Shilpi Akter has left no stone unturned to support herself and her family of five, even though she had lost her ability for labour-intensive work.

Human rights activists and feminists expressed grave concern over the words of independent MP of Bogura-7 Md Rezaul Karim Bablu, who said in parliament on Tuesday that feminists are to blame for the rape incidents across the country.

If the public and legal channels through which a survivor can report rape are not gender-sensitive, the consequences can be disastrous.